How to test/check contents of pdf files with robotframework?

[mr]

Hi everybody!

I have to test if some pdf files do contain some strings.

What is the best strategy to do it with the help of robot framework?

Regards!

[Kevin O.]

After evaluating the PDF tools native to Python, we decided to go with an external tool, pdftotext, a component of Xpdf.

Attached the library that we have barely used so far. It is a thin wrapper around the tool.
As is, the library will only work on Windows with pdftotext.exe placed in a folder called xpdf that is in the same folder as the library. We put pdftotext.exe in SCM and do not need cross-platform support yet, but it would not be too hard to fix that.

I hope it is helpful.

I am curious what others have done.

Kevin

[David]

If one is not restricted to Python only, then there are more options.

On the Java side, one could look into using Apache PDFBox or iText. I don't suppose anyone wrote wrapper RF libraries for them yet, but one could easily do that, following the RF documentation & the example docs for the Java PDF libraries. And run these over Jython, switching to Java remote server if Jython route is a no go.

I've used Apache PDFBox to extract out text from a PDF for test verification. But we don't use RF at my organization so I just had it as a regular Java wrapper class library that's not built for RF in mind.

FYI, there's a list of good PDF tools that one can evaluate for this job as well for integration with RF. I haven't checked which are Python and not.

http://pdfliberation.wordpress.com

[mr]

@Kevin: Thanks for the library. It works well.

A hint: I had some encoding/decoding problems which could not be easily solved by the "-enc" parameter of pdftotext. Therefore I used the string library:

${content}= Convert Pdf To Text Using Pdftotext somePdfFile.pdf

${string}= Decode Bytes To String ${content} ISO-8859-1

[David]

FYI, I did come across this recently that can be an option as well:

https://code.google.com/p/robotframework-pdflibrary/

Java based library so to be run with Jython or Java remote server. Uses iText library.