Pure Python PDF to text converter (Python recipe) by Dirk Holtwick

ActiveState Code (http://code.activestate.com/recipes/511465/)

The pdftotxt tool in Xpdf (http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/download.html) can do a similar thing, though not in Python.

backslash should be escaped. This code doesn't work as it is here. The backslash should be escaped on this line: content = " ".join(content.replace("\xa0", " ").strip().split())

Error found. Given code doesn't work. Error shows when running my system:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "pdfext.py", line 15, in
    print getPDFContent("testds.pdf")
  File "C:\Python25\lib\encodings\cp437.py", line 12, in encode
    return codecs.charmap_encode(input,errors,encoding_map)
UnicodeEncodeError: 'charmap' codec can't encode character u'\xde' in position 1
018: character maps to

Can anyone could solve the problem and may I know the reason for error?

This version takes care of Unicode errors:

import pyPdf

def getPDFContent(path):
    content = ""
    # Load PDF into pyPDF
    pdf = pyPdf.PdfFileReader(file(path, "rb"))
    # Iterate pages
    for i in range(0, pdf.getNumPages()):
        # Extract text from page and add to content
        content += pdf.getPage(i).extractText() + "\n"
    # Collapse whitespace
    content = " ".join(content.replace(u"\xa0", " ").strip().split())
    return content

print getPDFContent("test.pdf").encode("ascii", "ignore")

'ignore' is too rough, i'd rather use print getPDFContent("test.pdf").encode("ascii", "xmlcharrefreplace")

how to get text with spaces between them ,, the output for this program seems to be merging all texts in a single string.