Extract text from PDF File using Python

Situatie

All of you must be familiar with what PDFs are. In fact, they are one of the most important and widely used digital media. PDF stands for Portable Document Format. It uses .pdf extension. It is used to present and exchange documents reliably, independent of software, hardware, or operating system.

Solutie

Pasi de urmat

To install this package type the below command in the terminal.

pip install PyPDF2

# importing required modules

import PyPDF2

# creating a pdf file object

pdfFileObj = open(‘example.pdf’, ‘rb’)

# creating a pdf reader object

pdfReader = PyPDF2.PdfFileReader(pdfFileObj)

# printing number of pages in pdf file

print(pdfReader.numPages)

# creating a page object

pageObj = pdfReader.getPage(0)

# extracting text from page

print(pageObj.extractText())

# closing the pdf file object

pdfFileObj.close()

Let us try to understand the above code in chunks:

```
pdfFileObj = open('example.pdf', 'rb')
```
We opened the example.pdf in binary mode. and saved the file object as pdfFileObj.
```
pdfReader = PyPDF2.PdfFileReader(pdfFileObj)
```
Here, we create an object of PdfFileReader class of PyPDF2 module and pass the pdf file object & get a pdf reader object.
```
print(pdfReader.numPages)
```
numPages property gives the number of pages in the pdf file. For example, in our case, it is 20 (see first line of output).
```
pageObj = pdfReader.getPage(0)
```
Now, we create an object of PageObject class of PyPDF2 module. pdf reader object has function getPage() which takes page number (starting form index 0) as argument and returns the page object.
```
print(pageObj.extractText())
```
Page object has function extractText() to extract text from the pdf page.
```
pdfFileObj.close()
```
At last, we close the pdf file object.

Tip solutie

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