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I need to call the pdfminer top level python script from my python code:

Here is the link to pdfminer documentation:

https://github.com/pdfminer/pdfminer.six

The readme file shows how to call it from terminal os prompt as follows:

pdf2txt.py samples/simple1.pdf

Here, the pdf2txt.py is installed in the global space by the pip command:

pip install pdfminer.six

I would like to call this from my python code, which is in the project root directory:

my_main.py (in the project root directory)

for pdf_file_name in input_file_list:
   # somehow call pdf2txt.py with pdf_file_name as argument
   # and write out the text file in the output_txt directory

How can I do that?

halfelf
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Bharat
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  • Can you import the script like a module? add a main in the script, if it doesn't have one already. then when you import the file, you can just call main. – zafrin Dec 21 '18 at 01:13

2 Answers2

1

I think you need to import it in your code and follow the examples in the docs:

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
# Open a PDF file.
fp = open('mypdf.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.
# Supply the password for initialization.
document = PDFDocument(parser, password)
# 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)
# Create a PDF interpreter object.
interpreter = PDFPageInterpreter(rsrcmgr, device)
# Process each page contained in the document.
for page in PDFPage.create_pages(document):
interpreter.process_page(page)

I don't see any point of using shell given you are doing something usual.

Farzad Vertigo
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0

I would suggest two ways to do this!

  1. Use os

    import os
os.system("pdf2txt.py samples/simple1.pdf")

  2. use subprocess

    import subprocess
subprocess.call("pdf2txt.py samples/simple1.pdf", shell=True)
Venkatachalam
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  • Thank you. This worked. Which one of these is better? Using os.system or subprocess.call? And why? – Bharat Dec 21 '18 at 14:11