Searching text in a PDF using Python?

This is called PDF mining, and is very hard because:

PDF is a document format designed to be printed, not to be parsed. Inside a PDF document, text is in no particular order (unless order is important for printing), most of the time the original text structure is lost (letters may not be grouped as words and words may not be grouped in sentences, and the order they are placed in the paper is often random).
There are tons of software generating PDFs, many are defective.

Tools like PDFminer use heuristics to group letters and words again based on their position in the page. I agree, the interface is pretty low level, but it makes more sense when you know what problem they are trying to solve (in the end, what matters is choosing how close from the neighbors a letter/word/line has to be in order to be considered part of a paragraph).

An expensive alternative (in terms of time/computer power) is generating images for each page and feeding them to OCR, may be worth a try if you have a very good OCR.

So my answer is no, there is no such thing as a simple, effective method for extracting text from PDF files - if your documents have a known structure, you can fine-tune the rules and get good results, but it is always a gambling.

I would really like to be proven wrong.

[update]

The answer has not changed but recently I was involved with two projects: one of them is using computer vision in order to extract data from scanned hospital forms. The other extracts data from court records. What I learned is:

Computer vision is at reach of mere mortals in 2018. If you have a good sample of already classified documents you can use OpenCV or SciKit-Image in order to extract features and train a machine learning classifier to determine what type a document is.
If the PDF you are analyzing is "searchable", you can get very far extracting all the text using a software like pdftotext and a Bayesian filter (same kind of algorithm used to classify SPAM).

So there is no reliable and effective method for extracting text from PDF files but you may not need one in order to solve the problem at hand (document type classification).

I am totally a green hand, but this script works for me:

# import packages
import PyPDF2
import re

# open the pdf file
object = PyPDF2.PdfFileReader("test.pdf")

# get number of pages
NumPages = object.getNumPages()

# define keyterms
String = "Social"

# extract text and do the search
for i in range(0, NumPages):
    PageObj = object.getPage(i)
    print("this is page " + str(i)) 
    Text = PageObj.extractText() 
    # print(Text)
    ResSearch = re.search(String, Text)
    print(ResSearch)

I've written extensive systems for the company I work for to convert PDF's into data for processing (invoices, settlements, scanned tickets, etc.), and @Paulo Scardine is correct--there is no completely reliable and easy way to do this. That said, the fastest, most reliable, and least-intensive way is to use pdftotext, part of the xpdf set of tools. This tool will quickly convert searchable PDF's to a text file, which you can read and parse with Python. Hint: Use the -layout argument. And by the way, not all PDF's are searchable, only those that contain text. Some PDF's contain only images with no text at all.

I recently started using ScraperWiki to do what you described.

Here's an example of using ScraperWiki to extract PDF data.

The scraperwiki.pdftoxml() function returns an XML structure.

You can then use BeautifulSoup to parse that into a navigatable tree.

Here's my code for -

import scraperwiki, urllib2
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

def send_Request(url):
#Get content, regardless of whether an HTML, XML or PDF file
    pageContent = urllib2.urlopen(url)
    return pageContent

def process_PDF(fileLocation):
#Use this to get PDF, covert to XML
    pdfToProcess = send_Request(fileLocation)
    pdfToObject = scraperwiki.pdftoxml(pdfToProcess.read())
    return pdfToObject

def parse_HTML_tree(contentToParse):
#returns a navigatibale tree, which you can iterate through
    soup = BeautifulSoup(contentToParse)
    return soup

pdf = process_PDF('http://greenteapress.com/thinkstats/thinkstats.pdf')
pdfToSoup = parse_HTML_tree(pdf)
soupToArray = pdfToSoup.findAll('text')
for line in soupToArray:
    print line

This code is going to print a whole, big ugly pile of <text> tags. Each page is separated with a </page>, if that's any consolation.

If you want the content inside the <text> tags, which might include headings wrapped in <b> for example, use line.contents

If you only want each line of text, not including tags, use line.getText()

It's messy, and painful, but this will work for searchable PDF docs. So far I've found this to be accurate, but painful.

Searching text in a PDF using Python?

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