[Tutor] PDF to text conversion

[Robert Berman]

Bob,

Thank you for the quick reply. I am acquainted with that method, and 
that will certainly work to do some really serious testing; but, the 
data collection is an ongoing process and  the users are requesting that 
every month the latest entries (8) are brought into the system. What is 
rather irksome is that the output from the system cannot be changed from 
PDF to text; so obviously I am going to have to resolve the situation at 
my end.

I am envisioning a simple program that once started reads the data file, 
converts the data into text, and then sends the data to the database. 
The program doesn't care if there are 8 test results or 80,000 test 
results. That is why i am looking for a python module.

Thanks again,

Robert Berman

bob gailer wrote:
> Robert Berman wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I must convert a history file in PDF format that goes from May of 
>> 1988 to current date.  Readings are taken twice weekly and consist of 
>> the date taken mm/dd/yy and the results appearing as a 10 character 
>> numeric + special characters sequence. This is obviously an easy 
>> setup for a very small database  application with the date as the 
>> key, the result string as the data.
>>
>> My problem is converting the PDF file into a text file which I can 
>> then read and process. I do not see any free python libraries having 
>> this capacity. I did see a PDFPILOT program for Windows but this 
>> application is being developed on Linux and should also run on 
>> Windows; so I do not want to incorporate a Windows only application.
>>
>> I do not think i am breaking any new frontiers with this application. 
>> Have any of you worked with such a library, or do you know of one or 
>> two I can download and work with? Hopefully, they have reasonable 
>> documentation.
>
> If this is a one-time conversion just use the save as text feature of 
> adobe reader.
>
>>
>> My development environment is:
>>
>> Python
>> Linux
>> Ubuntu version 8.10
>>
>>
>> Thanks for any help  you might be able to offer.
>>
>>
>> Robert Berman
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>
>