pdfminer3k - pdf2txt.py error - pdf

Question

I want to convert my pdf files to txt files and used pdfminer3k module & pdf2txt.py, however, I got an error.
pdf2txt.py -o file.txt -t tag file.pdf
This is my code at cmd screen.
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "C:\Python36\lib\site.py", line 67, in
import os
File "C:\Python36\lib\os.py", line 409
yield from walk(new_path, topdown, onerror, followlinks)
^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax
This is an error message that I got.
Could you help me to fix this problem??

Answer 1

Added for reference: Great resourse:
http://www.degeneratestate.org/posts/2016/Jun/15/extracting-tabular-data-from-pdfs/
The -t flag is the type of output. The options are text, tag, xml, and html.
Tag refers to generating a tag for xml. Replace tag with text in your command and try it.
The order of optional input also matters.
You also must invoke python, your command line does'nt know what import means, yet some of your environment seems to be setup. My example is for windows cmd from Anaconda3\Scripts directory. If your in juptyer notebook or a console, you should be able to run import pdf2txt with the .py
To setup your environment you need to append the os.path.append(yourpdfdirectory) otherwise file.pdf will not be found.
Try python pdf2txt.py -t text -o file.txt file.pdf
Or if you are brave...this is how to do programmatically. The trouble with xml is if you want to get the text, each character from xml tree is returned in an arbitrary order. You can get it to work but you need to build the string character by character which is not that hard, its just logically time consuming.
fp = open(filesin,'rb')
parser = PDFParser(fp)
doc = PDFDocument()
parser.set_document(doc)
doc.set_parser(parser)
doc.initialize('')
rsrcmgr = PDFResourceManager(caching=False)
laparams = LAParams(all_texts=True)
laparams.boxes_flow = -0.2
laparams.paragraph_indent = 0.2
laparams.detect_vertical = False
#laparams.heuristic_word_margin = 0.03
laparams.word_margin = 0.2
laparams.line_margin = 0.3
outfp = open(filesin+".out.tag" ,'wb')
device = PDFPageAggregator(rsrcmgr, laparams=laparams)
interpreter = PDFPageInterpreter(rsrcmgr, device)
#process_pdf(rsrcmgr, device, pdfparse, pagenos,caching=c, check_extractable=True)
for p,page in enumerate(doc.get_pages()):
if p == 0: #temporary for page 1
interpreter.process_page(page)
layout = device.get_result()
alltextinbox = ''
#This is a rich environment so categorization of this object hierarchy is needed
for c,lt_obj in enumerate(layout):
#print(type(lt_obj),"This is type ",c,"th object on the ",p,"th page")
if isinstance(lt_obj,LTTextBoxHorizontal) or isinstance(lt_obj,LTTextBox) or isinstance(lt_obj,LTTextLine):
print("Type ,",type(lt_obj)," and text ..",lt_obj.get_text())
obj_textbox_line.update({lt_obj:lt_obj.get_text()})
elif p != 0:
pass
fp.close()
#print(obj_textbox_line)
#call the column finder here
#check_matching("example", "example1")
#text_doc_df = pd.DataFrame(obj_textbox_line,columns=['text'])
#print (text_doc_df)
pass
I'm working on a generic row/column matcher. If you don't want to bother, you can buy this software already for like 150 bucks for a pro converter.