CODEWITHSUNDEEP
python
Jesvin Jose
Jesvin Jose

Reputation: 23078

solution to convert PDFs, DOCs, DOCXs into a textual format with python

I am developing a full text search engine for indexing popular binary formats. I know that there are hundereds of such questions (and solutions) already, but I found it tough to find one:

Upvotes: 0

Views: 2686

Answers (4)

enthus1ast
enthus1ast

Reputation: 2109

Textract uses the default tools for every kind of file.

https://github.com/deanmalmgren/textract

Upvotes: 0

Gaslight Deceive Subvert
Gaslight Deceive Subvert

Reputation: 20354

One possible solution is to use google documents to extract the text contents from binary .doc-files. You upload the document to google docs and then download the text contents. It is a fairly slow process, but it is the only "pure Python" solution I know of since it doesn't require any external tools except for network access. An external tool such as catdoc or antiword is a much better solution if you are allowed to install it on your host.

Upvotes: 0

codeape
codeape

Reputation: 100756

  • For PDFs, I recommend PDFminer.
  • Try the docx module (I have not used it myself)
  • I am not aware of any pure python module that can read .doc files.
  • There are command-line tools to extract text from .doc files: antiword and catdoc (and probably others). If the packages are installed on your shared host, you could use subprocess to shell out to these tools. Available on Windows via Cygwin.
  • Apache POI is a Java library that can extract text from Office documents. If your shared host has Java installed, you could write a bit of Java (or Jython) code and execute using subprocess.

Upvotes: 1

Michał Niklas
Michał Niklas

Reputation: 54292

If at server side you can use OpenOffice then you can use unoconv: Convert between any document format supported by OpenOffice

Upvotes: 0

Related Questions