How to extract text from a pdf file

Question

I'm attempting to extract the text from a pdf file using python

With the help of PyPDF2 module, I tried this following code:

import PyPDF2

pdf_file = open('sample.pdf')

read_pdf = PyPDF2.PdfFileReader(pdf_file)

number_of_pages = read_pdf.getNumPages()

page = read_pdf.getPage(0)

page_content = page.extractText()

print page_content

But, When I execute the code, I'm getting this kind of output, which is actually different from the PDF document, which I included.

!"#$%#$%&%$&'()*%+,-%./01'*23%4

5'%1$#26%3/%7/))/8%&)/26%8#3"%3"*%313/9#&)

%

How to extract the text from the PDF document? 

Answer 1

I was searching for a straightforward answer for use for python 3.x and windows. There doesn't appear to be help from textract, which is actually unfortunate, yet on the off chance that you are searching for a straightforward answer for windows/python 3 checkout the tika package, truly straightforward for reading the pdfs.

Tika-Python is a Python binding to the Apache Tika™ REST services allowing Tika to be called natively in the Python community.

from tika import parser # pip install tika

raw = parser.from_file('sample.pdf')

print(raw['content'])

Tika is also insatlled in the Java. So, you want a Java runtime installed.

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