🔍 Code Extractor

Extracts all text content from a PDF document and returns it as a string.

Purpose

This function provides a simple interface to extract text from PDF files. It wraps a PDFTextExtractor class to handle the actual extraction process. The function is useful for document processing pipelines, text analysis, data extraction from PDFs, and content indexing applications where you need to access the textual content of PDF documents programmatically.

Source Code

def extract_text_from_pdf(input_path: str) -> str:
    """
    Extract text from a PDF document
    
    Parameters
    ----------
    input_path : str
        Path to the PDF document
        
    Returns
    -------
    str
        Extracted text
    """
    extractor = PDFTextExtractor()
    return extractor.extract_text(input_path)

Parameters

Parameter Details

input_path: A string representing the file system path to the PDF document from which text should be extracted. This should be an absolute or relative path to a valid PDF file. The file must exist and be readable by the application.

Return Value

Type: str

Returns a string containing all extracted text from the PDF document. The text is typically concatenated from all pages in the PDF. The exact formatting and structure of the returned text depends on the PDFTextExtractor implementation, but generally preserves the reading order of text elements in the PDF.

Dependencies

• fitz
• pikepdf
• reportlab
• PIL
• docx2pdf
• pandas

Required Imports

import fitz
import pikepdf

Usage Example

# Assuming PDFTextExtractor is available in the current scope
# or imported from the appropriate module

input_pdf_path = '/path/to/document.pdf'

# Extract text from the PDF
extracted_text = extract_text_from_pdf(input_pdf_path)

# Use the extracted text
print(f"Extracted {len(extracted_text)} characters")
print(extracted_text[:500])  # Print first 500 characters

# Example with error handling
try:
    text = extract_text_from_pdf('report.pdf')
    # Process the text further
    word_count = len(text.split())
    print(f"Document contains {word_count} words")
except FileNotFoundError:
    print("PDF file not found")
except Exception as e:
    print(f"Error extracting text: {e}")

Best Practices

• Ensure the input_path points to a valid, readable PDF file before calling this function
• Handle potential exceptions such as FileNotFoundError, PermissionError, or PDF parsing errors
• Be aware that complex PDFs with images, tables, or multi-column layouts may not extract text in the expected reading order
• For large PDF files, consider the memory implications as the entire text content is loaded into memory
• The function depends on the PDFTextExtractor class implementation - ensure it is properly initialized and available
• Consider validating that the file is actually a PDF before attempting extraction
• For production use, implement proper error handling and logging around this function call

Tags

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