I am trying to extract text from a PDF file using Python. My main goal is I am trying to create a program that reads a bank statement and extracts its text to update an excel file to easily record monthly spendings. Right now I am focusing just extracting the text from the pdf file but I don't know how to do so.
What is currently the best and easiest way to extract text from a PDF file into a string? What library is best to use today and how can I do it?
I have tried using PyPDF2 but everytime I try to extract text from any page using extractText(), it returns empty strings. I have tried installing textract but I get errors because I need more libraries I think.
import PyPDF2
pdfFileObj = open("January2019.pdf", 'rb')
pdfReader = PyPDF2.PdfFileReader(pdfFileObj)
pageObj = pdfReader.getPage(0)
print(pageObj.extractText())
This prints empty strings when it should be printing the contents of the page
I have tried many methods but failed, include PyPDF2 and Tika. I finally found the module pdfplumber that is work for me, you also can try it.
Hope this will be helpful to you.
import pdfplumber
pdf = pdfplumber.open('pdffile.pdf')
page = pdf.pages[0]
text = page.extract_text()
print(text)
pdf.close()
Using tika worked for me!
from tika import parser
rawText = parser.from_file('January2019.pdf')
rawList = rawText['content'].splitlines()
This made it really easy to extract separate each line in the bank statement into a list.
PyPDF2 does not read whole pdf correctly. You must use this code.
import pdftotext
pdfFileObj = open("January2019.pdf", 'rb')
pdf = pdftotext.PDF(pdfFileObj)
# Iterate over all the pages
for page in pdf:
print(page)
import PyPDF2
pdf-file = open('January2019.pdf', 'rb')
pdfReader = PyPDF2.PdfFileReader(pdf-file)
count = pdfReader.numPages
for i in range(count):
page = pdfReader.getPage(i)
print(page.extractText())
import pdftables_api
import os
c = pdftables_api.Client('MY-API-KEY')
file_path = "C:\\Users\\MyName\\Documents\\PDFTablesCode\\"
for file in os.listdir(file_path):
if file.endswith(".pdf"):
c.xlsx(os.path.join(file_path,file), file+'.xlsx')
Go to https://pdftables.com to get an API key.
CSV, format=csv
XML, format=xml
HTML, format=html
XLSX, format=xlsx-single, format=xlsx-multiple
Try pdfreader. You can extract either plain text or decoded text containing "pdf markdown":
from pdfreader import SimplePDFViewer, PageDoesNotExist
fd = open(you_pdf_file_name, "rb")
viewer = SimplePDFViewer(fd)
plain_text = ""
pdf_markdown = ""
try:
while True:
viewer.render()
pdf_markdown += viewer.canvas.text_content
plain_text += "".join(viewer.canvas.strings)
viewer.next()
except PageDoesNotExist:
pass
PyPDF2 is highly unreliable for extracting text from pdf . as pointed out here too.
it says :
While PyPDF2 has .extractText(), which can be used on its page objects
(not shown in this example), it does not work very well. Some PDFs
will return text and some will return an empty string. When you want
to extract text from a PDF, you should check out the PDFMiner project
instead. PDFMiner is much more robust and was specifically designed
for extracting text from PDFs.
You could instead install and use pdfminer using
pip install pdfminer
or you can use another open source utility named pdftotext
by xpdfreader. instructions to use the utility is given on the page.
you can download the command line tools from here
and could use the pdftotext.exe utility using subprocess
.detailed explanation for using subprocess is given here