Skip to content

Latest commit

 

History

History
103 lines (74 loc) · 3.24 KB

python_package.rst

File metadata and controls

103 lines (74 loc) · 3.24 KB
Raw

Python package

This package is organized to make it as easy as possible to add new extensions and support the continued growth and coverage of textract. For almost all applications, you will just have to do something like this:

import textract
text = textract.process('path/to/file.extension')

to obtain text from a document. You can also pass keyword arguments to textract.process, for example, to use a particular method for parsing a pdf like this:

import textract
text = textract.process('path/to/a.pdf', method='pdfminer')

or to specify a particular output encoding (input encodings are inferred using chardet):

import textract
text = textract.process('path/to/file.extension', encoding='ascii')

Additional options

Some parsers also enable additional options which can be passed in as keyword arguments to the textract.process function. Here is a quick table of available options that are available to the different types of parsers:

parser option description
gif language Specify the language for OCR-ing text with tesseract
jpg language Specify the language for OCR-ing text with tesseract
png language Specify the language for OCR-ing text with tesseract
pdf language For use when method='tesseract', specify the language
tiff language Specify the language for OCR-ing text with tesseract

As an example of using these additional options, you can extract text from a Norwegian PDF using Tesseract OCR like this:

text = textract.process(
    'path/to/norwegian.pdf',
    method='tesseract',
    language='nor',
)

A look under the hood

When textract.process('path/to/file.extension') is called, textract.process looks for a module called textract.parsers.extension_parser that also contains a Parser.

textract.parsers.process

Importantly, the textract.parsers.extension_parser.Parser class must inherit from textract.parsers.utils.BaseParser.

textract.parsers.utils.BaseParser

Many of the parsers rely on command line utilities to do some of the parsing. For convenience, the textract.parsers.utils.ShellParser class includes some convenience methods for streamlining access to the command line.

textract.parsers.utils.ShellParser

A few specific examples

There are quite a few parsers included with textract. Rather than elaborating all of them, here are a few that demonstrate how parsers work.

textract.parsers.epub_parser.Parser

textract.parsers.doc_parser.Parser