How to Parse Text Data from a PDF

Introduction

Under certain circumstances, we are compelled to extract the text content of a PDF document and export it to another format for further analysis. This is helpful with select projects, mainly those involving Natural Language Processing (NLP).

Moreover, we always come across situations where someone sends us a PDF document that we need to edit, but to do so, we must first extract its text content and save it to a word processing program.

Since PDF is closer to a graphic representation with a complex structure mining data from a PDF file has always been a big challenge.

To overcome this hindrance, we will try to develop a PDF text parser with the help of the Python programming language.

Scope

This lesson shows us the steps required to extract the text content of a PDF document, and to save the gathered content to a text file under a specific folder using Python programming language.