pdftoxml Error

[Andrey Tomashevskiy]

Hi all,

Sorry if this is a simple problem but I have been unable to find a solution anywhere and I am new to Python in general. I am having a lot of trouble getting the scraperwiki pdftoxml command to work on my computer. I am using Windows 8 with Python 2.7. Whenever I attempt to run the "pdftoxml" module from scraperwiki, I keep getting a "The system cannot find the path specified" error. I am guessing this has something to do with pdftohtml not working properly but I am not sure how to fix this issue. I'd really appreciate any help in solving this issue.

[Francis Irving]

Are you using ScraperWiki Classic or new ScraperWiki?

Can you give a link to the scraper?

On 9 Feb 2014 20:40, "Andrey Tomashevskiy" <toma...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi all,

Sorry if this is a simple problem but I have been unable to find a solution anywhere and I am new to Python in general. I am having a lot of trouble getting the scraperwiki pdftoxml command to work on my computer. I am using Windows 8 with Python 2.7. Whenever I attempt to run the "pdftoxml" module from scraperwiki, I keep getting a "The system cannot find the path specified" error. I am guessing this has something to do with pdftohtml not working properly but I am not sure how to fix this issue. I'd really appreciate any help in solving this issue.

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[Andrey Tomashevskiy]

I am not using the online scraperwiki interface, if that is what you mean. I installed the scraperwiki module using pip install on my computer. I also downloaded pdftohtml from http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdftohtml/ and placed the executable in my path folder. I tried following the example code at https://gist.github.com/psychemedia/5800840 but cannot get past line 11 since I get the "The system cannot find the path specified" error.

[Alexander Dunbar]

I am having a similar issue but I'm getting no error but when I try and run . 

pdfdata = urllib2.urlopen(url)
xmldata = scraperwiki.pdftoxml(pdfdata.read())

xmldata is empty all the time.

[Steven Maude]

Need more information to be able to give you much help!

1. Which URL are you trying to access?

2. Do you have pdftohtml working on your machine?

If no to 2, what OS are you using?

If yes to 2, what happens if you download and save the PDF as input.pdf e.g. via browser or wget and then run:

pdftohtml -xml -nodrm -zoom 1.5 -enc UTF-8 -noframes input.pdf output.xml
(This is the command that scraperwiki.pdftoxml() executes.)

Do this generate an output.xml?

[Nick Evershed]

I'm having the same issue as Alexander, and have just confirmed pdftohtml is installed correctly and working.

pdftohtml version 0.40

scraperwiki freshly installed via pip

this code works fine on web scraperwiki, but xmldata is empty when I try to run it locally:

import scraperwiki

import requests

r = requests.get('https://www.vec.vic.gov.au/files/Census%20QuickStats/Wendouree%20District%202014.pdf')

xmldata = scraperwiki.pdftoxml(r.content)

print xmldata

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[Steven Maude]

Hi Nick,

The pdftoxml function isn't particularly well documented or supported
outside of Linux, I think and it's really just a wrapper around
pdftohtml that takes in downloaded data, saves it as a temporary file,
and runs pdftohtml on that file, saving the output as another temporary
file.

If you're running on Windows, you could try a pdftoxml function that I
hacked to work on Windows a few months ago:

https://gist.github.com/StevenMaude/88def892b0cbfa8ae818#file-pdf_to_html-py-L42-L54

Paste in the pdftoxml() (lines 42-54, should be highlighted) and replace
xmldata = scraperwiki.pdftoxml(r.content) with xmldata = pdftoxml(r.content)

This won't do the nice thing of using temporary files and cleaning up
after itself (you'll have to do that!), but it should at least work.

If not, the other thing you can do to diagnose is try pasting in the
pdftoxml() from here into your script:
https://github.com/scraperwiki/scraperwiki-python/blob/master/scraperwiki/utils.py#L41-L59
but then comment out or remove line 52 (the line: cmd = cmd + "
>/dev/null 2>&1" ) as this suppresses any errors. You'll then hopefully
be able to get a better idea of what's going on.

Another alternative is try the PDF at https://pdftables.com - just
checked and it does a mostly decent job of handling it.

Hope that helps,

Steve

[Nick Leaton]

Steve, 

Wrong Nick. 

Autocorrect for you. 

Nick

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Nick

[Gasper Zejn]

Another alternative you could try is installing pypdf2xml [1], and then running

from StringIO import StringIO
from pypdf2xml import pdf2xml

import requests

r =
requests.get('https://www.vec.vic.gov.au/files/Census%20QuickStats/Wendouree%20District%202014.pdf')

xmldata = pdf2xml(StringIO(r.content))


pypdf2xml is a replacement I wrote for scraperwiki.pdftoxml, because
that used to have
some problems with certain unicode characters. It uses pdfminer, which is
pure python, so that may help you a bit in a windows environment.

kr,
Gasper Zejn

[1] https://github.com/zejn/pypdf2xml

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