I had a folder hundreds of emails in the form of PDFs, and I needed to be able to parse them. So, the goal in this gist is to convert all of the PDFs into text files which I could then parse using Regex into a CSV file.

PDFtoText.py

from cStringIO import StringIO
from pdfminer.pdfinterp import PDFResourceManager, PDFPageInterpreter
from pdfminer.converter import TextConverter
from pdfminer.layout import LAParams
from pdfminer.pdfpage import PDFPage
import os
import sys, getopt

def convert(fname, pages=None):
    if not pages:
        pagenums = set()
    else:
        pagenums = set(pages)

    output = StringIO()
    manager = PDFResourceManager()
    converter = TextConverter(manager, output, laparams=LAParams())
    interpreter = PDFPageInterpreter(manager, converter)

    infile = file(fname, 'rb')
    for page in PDFPage.get_pages(infile, pagenums):
        interpreter.process_page(page)
    infile.close()
    converter.close()
    text = output.getvalue()
    output.close
    return text

# Converts all PDFs in directory pdfDirectory, saves all resulting text files to textDirectory
def convertMultiple(pdfDirectory, textDirectory):
    if pdfDirectory == "": pdfDirectory = os.getcwd() + "\\" # Returns current working directory, if pdfDirectory is empty.
    i = 0
    for pdf in os.listdir(pdfDirectory): # Iterate through PDFs in pdfDirectory
        print("Processing File: " + str(pdf))
        fileExtension = pdf.split(".")[-1]
        if fileExtension == "pdf":
            pdfFilename = pdfDirectory + pdf # Becomes: \PATH_TO_PDF\example.pdf
            text = convert(pdfFilename) # Send PDF file to convert()
            textFilename = textDirectory + pdf + ".txt" # Create file name structure of outputted text file
            textFile = open(textFilename, "w") # Make text file
            textFile.write(text) # Write text to file
            i += 1
    print("Successfully wrote " + str(i) + " files to disk.")


#i : info
#p : pdfDirectory
#t = textDirectory
def main(argv):
    pdfDirectory = "../Documents/pdf//" # Put your source directory of PDFs here
    textDirectory = "../Documents/text//" # Where you want your converted files to go.
    try:
        opts, args = getopt.getopt(argv,"ip:t:")
    except getopt.GetoptError:
        print("pdfToT.py -p <pdfDirectoryectory> -t <textdirectory>")
        sys.exit(2)
    for opt, arg in opts:
        if opt == "-i":
            print("pdfToT.py -p <pdfDirectoryectory> -t <textdirectory>")
            sys.exit()
        elif opt == "-p":
            pdfDirectory = arg
        elif opt == "-t":
            textDirectory = arg
    convertMultiple(pdfDirectory, textDirectory)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    main(sys.argv[1:])