Do you need to extract text from different files such as pdfs and Word files?

This quick tutorial shows how sort files by type, and then extract text from PDF files. I downloaded two fake resumes in pdf format from Overleaf to demonstrate how this code works. I am not going to cover how to extract text from Word documents. You can download docxpy Python package and use it to extract text from Word files. Feel free to contact me at anna@sakura-ai.com if you have any questions or need help parsing documents.

The main challenge in extracting text from PDF files is that they have different formats:

• PDF files are either 8-bit binary files or 7-bit ASCII text files (using ASCII-85 encoding).

• Every line in a PDF can contain up to 255 characters.

• Every line ends with a carriage return, a line feed, or a carriage return followed by a line feed (depending upon the application or platform used to create the PDF file).

• PDF is case sensitive.

• The file format is completely independent of the platform that it is viewed or created on. Files can be moved back and forth between Macs, Windows system, Linux systems,… When FTP-ing a PDF file, it does make sense to compress it, to avoid data corruption by some outdated web system that the file needs to go through.

• Scanned PDFs are stored as images

#text-extraction #python3 #pdf-text-extractor #pdf