textract

As undesireable as it might be, more often than not there is extremely useful information embedded in Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, PDFs, etc—so-called “dark data”—that would be valuable for further textual analysis and visualization. While several packages exist for extracting content from each of these formats on their own, this package provides a single interface for extracting content from any type of file, without any irrelevant markup.

This package provides two primary facilities for doing this, the command line interface

textract path/to/file.extension

or the python package

# some python file
import textract
text = textract.process("path/to/file.extension")

Currently supporting

Please recommend other file types by either mentioning them on the issue tracker or by contributing

Installation

This package is built on top of several python packages and other source libraries. In particular, this package has a dependency on lxml that depends on some other libraries to be installed. On Ubuntu/Debian, you will need to run:

apt-get install python-dev libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev antiword poppler-utils

before running:

pip install textract

Contents:

Indices and tables