看看PyPDF2<=1.26.0的代码:

import PyPDF2
pdf_file = open('sample.pdf', 'rb')
read_pdf = PyPDF2.PdfFileReader(pdf_file)
page = read_pdf.getPage(0)
page_content = page.extractText()
print page_content.encode('utf-8')

输出结果为:

!"#$%#$%&%$&'()*%+,-%./01'*23%4
5'%1$#26%3/%7/))/8%&)/26%8#3"%3"*%313/9#&)
%

使用相同的代码从201308FCR.pdf读取pdf .输出正常。

它的文档解释了原因:

def extractText(self):
    """
    Locate all text drawing commands, in the order they are provided in the
    content stream, and extract the text.  This works well for some PDF
    files, but poorly for others, depending on the generator used.  This will
    be refined in the future.  Do not rely on the order of text coming out of
    this function, as it will change if this function is made more
    sophisticated.
    :return: a unicode string object.
    """

您可能希望使用经过时间验证的xPDF和派生工具来提取文本，因为pyPDF2在文本提取方面似乎仍然存在各种问题。

长的答案是，文本如何在PDF中编码有很多变化，它可能需要解码PDF字符串本身，然后可能需要与CMAP映射，然后可能需要分析单词和字母之间的距离等。

如果PDF被损坏(即显示正确的文本，但复制时产生垃圾)，并且您确实需要提取文本，那么您可能需要考虑将PDF转换为图像(使用ImageMagik)，然后使用Tesseract使用OCR从图像中获取文本。

PyPDF2确实有效，但结果可能有所不同。我从其结果提取中看到了相当不一致的结果。

reader=PyPDF2.pdf.PdfFileReader(self._path)
eachPageText=[]
for i in range(0,reader.getNumPages()):
    pageText=reader.getPage(i).extractText()
    print(pageText)
    eachPageText.append(pageText)

下面是提取文本的最简单代码

代码:

# importing required modules
import PyPDF2

# creating a pdf file object
pdfFileObj = open('filename.pdf', 'rb')

# creating a pdf reader object
pdfReader = PyPDF2.PdfFileReader(pdfFileObj)

# printing number of pages in pdf file
print(pdfReader.numPages)

# creating a page object
pageObj = pdfReader.getPage(5)

# extracting text from page
print(pageObj.extractText())

# closing the pdf file object
pdfFileObj.close()

如果您在Windows上的Anaconda中尝试它，PyPDF2可能无法处理一些具有非标准结构或unicode字符的pdf。如果您需要打开并阅读大量pdf文件，我建议使用以下代码-相对路径为。//pdfs//的文件夹中所有pdf文件的文本将存储在列表pdf_text_list中。

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)

在2020年，上述解决方案并不适用于我正在使用的特定pdf。下面是诀窍。我用的是Windows 10和Python 3.8

测试pdf文件:https://drive.google.com/file/d/1aUfQAlvq5hA9kz2c9CyJADiY3KpY3-Vn/view?usp=sharing

#pip install pdfminer.six
import io

from pdfminer.pdfinterp import PDFResourceManager, PDFPageInterpreter
from pdfminer.converter import TextConverter
from pdfminer.layout import LAParams
from pdfminer.pdfpage import PDFPage


def convert_pdf_to_txt(path):
    '''Convert pdf content from a file path to text

    :path the file path
    '''
    rsrcmgr = PDFResourceManager()
    codec = 'utf-8'
    laparams = LAParams()

    with io.StringIO() as retstr:
        with TextConverter(rsrcmgr, retstr, codec=codec,
                           laparams=laparams) as device:
            with open(path, 'rb') as fp:
                interpreter = PDFPageInterpreter(rsrcmgr, device)
                password = ""
                maxpages = 0
                caching = True
                pagenos = set()

                for page in PDFPage.get_pages(fp,
                                              pagenos,
                                              maxpages=maxpages,
                                              password=password,
                                              caching=caching,
                                              check_extractable=True):
                    interpreter.process_page(page)

                return retstr.getvalue()


if __name__ == "__main__":
    print(convert_pdf_to_txt('C:\\Path\\To\\Test_PDF.pdf'))