Extracting text from a PDF document is a common need in many scenarios, such as data mining, business automation, or data analysis. In this article, we will explore how to make a simple Go program to extract text from a PDF file. Go is a modern and powerful programming language, especially suited for developing high-performance applications. To accomplish this task, we will use an open-source Go library called pdfcpu, which allows you to handle PDF files, including text extraction.
First, you need to install the pdfcpu
package in your current Go project. This can be done using the command:
go get github.com/pdfcpu/pdfcpu
Here is a simple example of how to extract text from a PDF using pdfcpu
in the project's main.go file:
package main
import (
"fmt"
"log"
"os"
"github.com/pdfcpu/pdfcpu/pkg/api"
"github.com/pdfcpu/pdfcpu/pkg/pdfcpu"
)
func main() {
// Check if the PDF file was passed as an argument
if len(os.Args) < 2 {
log.Fatalf("Usage: %s <file.pdf>\n", os.Args[0])
}
pdfFile := os.Args[1]
// Configure PDFCPU to extract text
conf := pdfcpu.NewDefaultConfiguration()
// Extract text from PDF
out, err := api.ExtractTextFile(pdfFile, conf)
if err != nil {
log.Fatalf("Error extracting text: %v\n", err)
}
// Print the extracted text
fmt.Println(string(out))
}
Code explanation:
- Package import: The code uses the packages
fmt
,log
andos
provided by Go, as well aspdfcpu
for manipulating PDF files. - Checking arguments: The program checks whether a PDF file was passed as an argument. If not, an error message is displayed.
- Extracting text: The
api.ExtractTextFile
function is used to extract text from the PDF file. The function takes two parameters: the path to the PDF file and a default configuration. - Printing extracted text: The extracted text is converted to a string and printed to the console.
Conclusion
Extracting text from a PDF in Go is a relatively simple task thanks to the pdfcpu
library. With just a few lines of code, you can effectively extract text from PDF files and use it for further processing. This tool can be very useful for a variety of applications, especially when integrated into automated processing pipelines or document management systems.