deanmalmgren/textract

★ 4,555HTMLAudience · developerComplexity · 2/5Setup · moderate

Mindmap

mindmap
  root((textract))
    What it does
      Extract plain text
      Many file formats
      Single function call
    Use cases
      Search indexing
      NLP pipelines
      Data mining
      Document processing
    Audience
      Python developers
      Data engineers
    Distribution
      PyPI package
      Read the Docs

mindmap root((textract)) What it does Extract plain text Many file formats Single function call Use cases Search indexing NLP pipelines Data mining Document processing Audience Python developers Data engineers Distribution PyPI package Read the Docs

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Things people build with this

USE CASE 1

Extract readable text from a folder of PDF, Word, and spreadsheet files to build a search index

USE CASE 2

Pre-process uploaded documents in a web app so their content can be stored and searched

USE CASE 3

Pull text from a mixed-format document collection to feed into an NLP or classification pipeline

USE CASE 4

Convert a legacy archive of office files into plain text for data mining

Tech stack

Python

Getting it running

Difficulty · moderate Time to first run · 30min

Requires system-level tools such as antiword and pdftotext in addition to the Python package.

In plain English

textract is a Python library for extracting plain text out of documents. The project tagline is "extract text from any document, no muss, no fuss," which signals that the goal is a straightforward interface regardless of what file format you hand it. The topics listed on the repository include text mining, data mining, and natural language processing, pointing to use cases where a developer needs readable text as an input to some further analysis or processing step, such as searching, summarizing, or classifying a collection of files. The README is sparse. It gives the project name, the one-line description, and a link to the full documentation hosted on the Read the Docs platform at textract.readthedocs.org. Details about which file formats are supported, how to install the library, and how to call it in code are not included in the README and would need to be read from that external documentation site. The repository has accumulated over 4,500 stars on GitHub, which suggests it has been widely used or referenced in the Python data-processing community over the years. The project is available on PyPI, the standard Python package registry, based on the version and download badges shown in the README. Beyond those signals, the README does not describe licensing terms, the project's current maintenance status, or contribution guidelines.

Copy-paste prompts

Prompt 1

Using the textract Python library, write a script that walks a directory, extracts text from every supported file, and saves each result as a .txt file with the same base name.

Prompt 2

I have a mix of PDF and DOCX files. Show me how to use textract to extract the text from each and print it to the console.

Prompt 3

What file formats does textract support and how do I install it on macOS including all required system dependencies?

Prompt 4

Using textract and a simple keyword search, write a Python script that finds which documents in a folder mention a given term.

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