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extract_text

Source: R/extract_text.R
extract_text.Rd

Extract text from a file

Usage

extract_text(
  file,
  pages = NULL,
  area = NULL,
  password = NULL,
  encoding = NULL,
  copy = FALSE
)

Arguments

file

A character string specifying the path or URL to a PDF file.

pages

An optional integer vector specifying pages to extract from.

area

An optional list, of length equal to the number of pages specified, where each entry contains a four-element numeric vector of coordinates (top,left,bottom,right) containing the table for the corresponding page. As a convenience, a list of length 1 can be used to extract the same area from all (specified) pages.

password

Optionally, a character string containing a user password to access a secured PDF.

encoding

Optionally, a character string specifying an encoding for the text, to be passed to the assignment method of Encoding.

copy

Specifies whether the original local file(s) should be copied to tempdir() before processing. FALSE by default. The argument is ignored if file is URL.

Value

If pages = NULL (the default), a length 1 character vector, otherwise a vector of length length(pages).

Details

This function converts the contents of a PDF file into a single unstructured character string.

See also

extract_tables, extract_areas, split_pdf

Author

Thomas J. Leeper <thosjleeper@gmail.com>

Examples

# simple demo file
f <- system.file("examples", "fortytwo.pdf", package = "tabulapdf")

# extract all text
extract_text(f)
#> [1] "42 is the number from which the meaning of life, the universe, and everything can be derived.\n42 is the number from which the meaning of life, the universe, and everything can be derived.\n"

# extract all text from page 1 only
extract_text(f, pages = 1)
#> [1] "42 is the number from which the meaning of life, the universe, and everything can be derived.\n"

# extract text from selected area only
extract_text(f, area = list(c(209.4, 140.5, 304.2, 500.8)))
#> [1] "\n" "\n"