Extracting text from a PDF file using Python 2.7 on Windows 7

Question

I have been using PyPDF2 to extract the text included in this PDF file (generated with pdfTeX-1.40.0) using Python 2.7. It works fine but now i have to extract text from same pdf generated with LibreOffice 4.3 and the result is this(not whole):

˜ ! ˜"!#$  %
˘ˇˆ˙˝
ˇ
˝%&˘
%'%
˛˚˛˜ !
"#$#"%$&
'##()˛˚˛
˛˚˛˜  !"#$#"%$%
*+!

This is my code:

    pdfFileObj = open(filePath, 'rb')
    pdfReader = PyPDF2.PdfFileReader(pdfFileObj)
    pageText = ""
    for pageID in range(0, pdfReader.numPages): 
        pageObj = pdfReader.getPage(pageID)
        pageText = pageText + "\n" + str(pageObj.extractText().encode('utf-8')))
    for line in pageText:
        extInfo = extInfo + line
    pdfFileObj.close()

    if string2search.replace(' ','') in extInfo:
        stringPresent = True
    else:
        stringPresent = False

Is there any simple working solution for windows machine ? I found this topic about this, but there is no solution. I have also tried to use PDFMiner from this topic, but I get this error:

UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec cant encode character u'\xe9' in position 0: ordinal not in range (128)

Answer 1

I have finally found solution for this.

1.- Download Xpdf tools for windows

2.- copy pdftotext.exe from xpdf-tools-win-4.00\bin32 to C:\Windows\System32 and also to C:\Windows\SysWOW64

3.- use code:

import subprocess

try:
    extInfo = subprocess.check_output('pdftotext.exe '+filePath + ' -',shell=True,stderr=subprocess.STDOUT).strip()
except Exception as e:
    print (e) 

if string2search in extInfo:
    stringPresent = True
else:
    stringPresent = False