[python] How to extract text from a PDF file?

If you try it in Anaconda on Windows, PyPDF2 might not handle some of the PDFs with non-standard structure or unicode characters. I recommend using the following code if you need to open and read a lot of pdf files - the text of all pdf files in folder with relative path .//pdfs// will be stored in list pdf_text_list.

from tika import parser
import glob

def read_pdf(filename):
    text = parser.from_file(filename)
    return(text)


all_files = glob.glob(".\\pdfs\\*.pdf")
pdf_text_list=[]
for i,file in enumerate(all_files):
    text=read_pdf(file)
    pdf_text_list.append(text['content'])

print(pdf_text_list)