Extract text from PDF document using PDFMiner

pdfxtract.py

"""
Extract PDF text using PDFMiner. Adapted from
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5725278/python-help-using-pdfminer-as-a-library
"""

from pdfminer.pdfinterp import PDFResourceManager, PDFPageInterpreter#process_pdf
from pdfminer.pdfpage import PDFPage
from pdfminer.converter import TextConverter
from pdfminer.layout import LAParams

from cStringIO import StringIO

def pdf_to_text(pdfname):

    # PDFMiner boilerplate
    rsrcmgr = PDFResourceManager()
    sio = StringIO()
    codec = 'utf-8'
    laparams = LAParams()
    device = TextConverter(rsrcmgr, sio, codec=codec, laparams=laparams)
    interpreter = PDFPageInterpreter(rsrcmgr, device)

    # Extract text
    fp = file(pdfname, 'rb')
    for page in PDFPage.get_pages(fp):
        interpreter.process_page(page)
    fp.close()

    # Get text from StringIO
    text = sio.getvalue()

    # Cleanup
    device.close()
    sio.close()

    return text

The code, I am using right now is:

from pdfminer.pdfparser import PDFParser
from pdfminer.pdfdocument import PDFDocument
from pdfminer.pdfpage import PDFPage
from pdfminer.pdfpage import PDFTextExtractionNotAllowed
from pdfminer.pdfinterp import PDFResourceManager
from pdfminer.pdfinterp import PDFPageInterpreter
from pdfminer.pdfdevice import PDFDevice
from pdfminer.layout import LAParams
from pdfminer.converter import PDFPageAggregator
import pdfminer

Open a PDF file.

fp = open('doc.pdf', 'rb')

Create a PDF parser object associated with the file object.

parser = PDFParser(fp)

Create a PDF document object that stores the document structure.

Password for initialization as 2nd parameter

document = PDFDocument(parser)

Check if the document allows text extraction. If not, abort.

if not document.is_extractable:
raise PDFTextExtractionNotAllowed

Create a PDF resource manager object that stores shared resources.

rsrcmgr = PDFResourceManager()

Create a PDF device object.

device = PDFDevice(rsrcmgr)

BEGIN LAYOUT ANALYSIS

Set parameters for analysis.

laparams = LAParams(all_texts=True)

Create a PDF page aggregator object.

device = PDFPageAggregator(rsrcmgr, laparams=laparams)

Create a PDF interpreter object.

interpreter = PDFPageInterpreter(rsrcmgr, device)

def parse_obj(lt_objs):
file = open('doc.txt', "a+")

# loop over the object list
for obj in lt_objs:

    # if it's a textbox, print text and location
    if isinstance(obj, pdfminer.layout.LTTextBoxHorizontal):
        post_text = obj.get_text().replace('\n', ' ')
        file.write(post_text)

    # if it's a container, recurse
    elif isinstance(obj, pdfminer.layout.LTFigure):
        parse_obj(obj._objs)
file.close()

loop over all pages in the document

for page in PDFPage.create_pages(document):

# read the page into a layout object
interpreter.process_page(page)
layout = device.get_result()

# extract text from this object
parse_obj(layout._objs)

I'm so glad to announce that I released Python Multiple and Large PDF Documents Text Extraction solution on Github:
https://github.com/ahmedkhemiri95/PDFs-TextExtract

How do you extract a URL present in a PDF? For ex. if you are trying to extract the URL present in the left hand panel of the pdf version of a LinkedIn Profile using PDF miner?