🔍 Code Extractor

Extracts text content from the first few pages of a PDF file for content comparison purposes, returning up to 5000 characters.

Purpose

This function is designed to sample text content from PDF files without processing the entire document. It's particularly useful for duplicate detection, content comparison, or quick preview generation where reading the full PDF would be inefficient. The function limits extraction to a specified number of pages (default 3) and truncates output to 5000 characters to balance content representation with performance.

Source Code

def extract_text_from_pdf_sample(filepath: str, max_pages: int = 3) -> str:
    """Extract text from first few pages for content comparison"""
    try:
        text = ""
        with open(filepath, 'rb') as f:
            pdf_reader = PyPDF2.PdfReader(f)
            pages_to_read = min(max_pages, len(pdf_reader.pages))
            for i in range(pages_to_read):
                page = pdf_reader.pages[i]
                text += page.extract_text()
        return text[:5000]  # Return first 5000 chars
    except Exception as e:
        return ""

Parameters

Parameter Details

filepath: String path to the PDF file to be processed. Must be a valid file path that can be opened in binary read mode. The file should be a valid PDF format readable by PyPDF2.

max_pages: Integer specifying the maximum number of pages to extract text from, starting from page 1. Defaults to 3. The actual number of pages read will be the minimum of this value and the total pages in the PDF. Must be a positive integer.

Return Value

Type: str

Returns a string containing the extracted text from the sampled pages, truncated to a maximum of 5000 characters. If an exception occurs during processing (e.g., file not found, corrupted PDF, permission errors), returns an empty string. The text includes all extractable content from the specified pages concatenated together.

Dependencies

• PyPDF2

Required Imports

import PyPDF2

Usage Example

# Basic usage
from pathlib import Path
import PyPDF2

def extract_text_from_pdf_sample(filepath: str, max_pages: int = 3) -> str:
    try:
        text = ""
        with open(filepath, 'rb') as f:
            pdf_reader = PyPDF2.PdfReader(f)
            pages_to_read = min(max_pages, len(pdf_reader.pages))
            for i in range(pages_to_read):
                page = pdf_reader.pages[i]
                text += page.extract_text()
        return text[:5000]
    except Exception as e:
        return ""

# Extract text from first 3 pages (default)
sample_text = extract_text_from_pdf_sample('document.pdf')
print(f"Extracted {len(sample_text)} characters")

# Extract from first 5 pages
sample_text_extended = extract_text_from_pdf_sample('document.pdf', max_pages=5)

# Handle missing files gracefully
text = extract_text_from_pdf_sample('nonexistent.pdf')
if not text:
    print("Failed to extract text or file not found")

Best Practices

• Always check if the returned string is empty to detect extraction failures, as exceptions are silently caught
• Be aware that the function returns a maximum of 5000 characters regardless of how many pages are specified
• The function opens files in binary mode and properly closes them using context manager
• Consider the trade-off between max_pages value and processing time for large PDFs
• Text extraction quality depends on the PDF structure; scanned PDFs without OCR will return empty or minimal text
• For production use, consider logging the exception details instead of silently returning empty string
• The function is not suitable for complete document processing, only for sampling/preview purposes
• File path validation should be performed before calling this function if strict error handling is needed

Tags

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