How to extract text from PDF uploaded in Google App Engine using PyPDF2?

Question

Is there any way to extract text and documentInfo from PDF file uploaded via Google app engine? I want to use PyPDF2, and my code is this:

pdf_file = self.request.POST['file'].file
pdf_reader = pypdf.PdfFileReader(pdf_file)

This gives me error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
....
  File "/myrepo/myproj/main.py", line 154, in post
    pdf_text = pypdf.PdfFileReader(pdf_file)
  File "lib/PyPDF2/pdf.py", line 649, in __init__
    self.read(stream)
  File "lib/PyPDF2/pdf.py", line 1100, in read
    raise utils.PdfReadError, "EOF marker not found"
PdfReadError: EOF marker not found

It gives this error for any file, even for those that can successfully be read from file on the disk via open(filename, 'r')

am i missing something? thanks in advance!

Answer 1

the solution is to use get_uploads from blobstore_handlers.BlobstoreUploadHandler:

from google.appengine.ext.webapp import blobstore_handlers
from cStringIO import StringIO
import PyPDF2

class UploadHandler(blobstore_handlers.BlobstoreUploadHandler):
    def post(self):
        upload_files = self.get_uploads('file')
        blob_info = upload_files[0]
        blob_reader = blobstore.BlobReader(blob_info)
        blob_content = StringIO(blob_reader.read())
        pdf_info = PyPDF2.PdfFileReader(blob_content)