How to extract text from pdf in Python 3.7

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()

If you are looking for a maintained, bigger project, have a look at PyMuPDF. Install it with pip install pymupdf and use it like this:

import fitz

def get_text(filepath: str) -> str:
    with fitz.open(filepath) as doc:
        text = ""
        for page in doc:
            text += page.getText().strip()
        return text

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 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.

1. You could instead install and use pdfminer using

   pip install pdfminer

2. 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