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Is it possible to save the results of the "google" package to a txt file in python?

Link to program:
https://replit.com/#MichaelGordon5/DetailedSearch#main.py
I've coded a program that in essence, does an advanced google search, and Im planning on adding more to it later.
It uses the google search package
The issue I'm having with it is that when I print out the search results into the console:
#userquery = search term, amt= amount of results
for j in search(userquery, tld="com", num=amt, stop=amt, pause=0):
print(j)
I am unable to save the result to a text file. I have had some experience using f.write/open/close in the past but nothing I do seems to work. Any advice?

Note that I haven't actually tried your code, but the code below should work. I'm not sure if j needs to be cast as a str but it can't hurt.
sidenote: fix your indentation. It hurts my eyes. 4 spaces is what should always be used...
results = []
for j in search(userquery, tld="com", num=amt, stop=amt, pause=0):
print(j)
results.append(str(j))
with open("filename_goes_here.txt", "w") as outfile:
outfile.writelines(results)
Note that you could also keep the file open and write to it whenever you print out j...

How to access remote and encrypted PDF text without writing to local drive [closed]

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I am very new to the coding world and have been stuck on this one problem for 3 days now, searching everywhere for an answer, so any help will be greatly appreciated. I am needing to extract a small amount of text from a url-located Pdf file. I'm using sessions.get(chart_PDF) as the driver for locating the URL where chart_PDF is the example url below.
Example url is https://www.airservicesaustralia.com/aip/pending/dap/PADGN01-166_09SEP2021.pdf
I know I am able to write it to my local drive but I don't want to do that, I want to be able to do it remotely, since I only need a couple of numbers from it.
I have tried finding the password from the url page for decrypting, couldn't find. I've tried to use PyPDF2, pdfminer and pikepdf (probably not well).
I only need to retrieve two numbers near the bottom of the PDF that can be used for the rest of my code. Please help, even if it is a simple fix, I'm new to all this and need some help. Thanks.
from io import BytesIO
from pikepdf import Pdf as PDF
from pdfminer import high_level
chart_PDF = https://www.airservicesaustralia.com/aip/pending/dap/PADGN01-166_09SEP2021.pdf
retrieve = s.get(chart_PDF)
content = retrieve.content
response =urllib.request.urlopen(chart_PDF)
p = BytesIO(content)
p.getbuffer()
check = PDFPage.get_pages(p, check_extractable=False)
extract = high_level.extract_text(p)
I'm getting:
PDFTextExtractionNotAllowedWarning: The PDF <_io.BytesIO object at 0x000001B007ABEC20> contains a metadata field indicating that it should not allow text extraction. Ignoring this field and proceeding.warnings.warn(warning_msg, PDFTextExtractionNotAllowedWarning)
Alternately, if I try this:
from pikepdf import Pdf as PDF
from pdfminer.pdfpage import PDFPage
from PyPDF2 import PdfFileReader
new_pdf = PDF.new()
with PDF.open(p) as pdf:
print(len(pdf.pages))
page1 = pdf.pages[0]
if PdfFileReader.getIsEncrypted(pdf):
print(True)
PdfFileReader.decrypt(page1, password='')
pdf.close()
I get:
line 1987, in decrypt
return self._decrypt(password)
AttributeError: _decrypt
UPDATE 3/8/21
Thank you so much K J! You've seriously been a huge help!
from io import BytesIO
from pdfminer.pdfpage import PDFPage
from pdfminer import high_level
retrieve = s.get(chart_PDF)
content = retrieve.content
bytes = BytesIO(content)
bytes.getbuffer()
PDFPage.get_pages(bytes, check_extractable=False)
extract = high_level.extract_text(bytes, password='') #THIS LINE THROWS ERROR
joined = ''.join(extract)
find_txt = re.findall(r'[(]\d*[-]\d[.]\d[)]', joined)
print(find_txt)
bytes.close()
This is now working well and I have been able to pull the numbers that I need (I have basically pulled all numbers from inside brackets off the PDF). I'll sort through that to find which one I need.
Strangely enough, although its giving me what I need, my extract = high_level.extract_text(bytes, password='') line still throws the Warning: (warning_msg, PDFTextExtractionNotAllowedWarning) which is rather annoying. Not sure how this process works but its still letting the info out.
I can't use try except or it skips over it. What is the way around this? how can I stop that error coming up?
FINAL UPDATE
I got around the warning and it works well now.
with warnings.catch_warnings():
warnings.simplefilter("ignore")
extract = high_level.extract_text(bytes)
Cheers fellas for putting up with my ignorance, you've helped so much.

The whole file has to be downloaded to a device via RAM so the blob as a FILE can be parsed at the very END for one OR more %%EOF and the location of page 0 (it gets converted to 1 or i) it could be ANYWHERE IN THE STREAM,.
THEN you can navigate to other sequential numbered pages in the RANDOM order they are built. Any complaints please contact Adobe.
However it is easiest if it is cached as a physical FILE object. If you dont want that on disk use a ram drive for your browser.
Again those two objects at bottom of page one could be anywhere mixed into the content of "page" 99's objects, or otherwise. each letter in a PDF can in its extreme be more than one object anywhere in the file. but a good authoring editor would try to keep them as lines by lines. (there is no such PDF thing as a word or paragraph.)
We can Print the file as Plain Text to see how it is composited and although (secured) that is allowed.
I tried printing from browser with little success but know that can depend on browser system and OS print drivers. Here I have printed the page as text using Acrobat portable, so we can see the sequential offsets of each text block from Left Hand margin JUST LIKE a PDF VIEWER would need to rebuild them.
UPDATE
You said your target is (1380-4.4) to the RIGHT of ALTERNATE but again A PDF has no concept of Left and Right or BEFORE or AFTER so we find IN THIS FILE the variable target is in 2 separate pieces PRIOR to the KNOWN characters which luckily is a complete single block (alternate). Thus here proximity of plain text could well work if the capture is confined to that nearby locality. However there is no guarantee that ALTERNATE would always be a single block.
It was perhaps not a good Idea To show the way a Printer would be given a stream of sequential data
Here is the way one PDF viewer goes about decrypting the file
As stated on this occasion the word ALTERNATE is defined as text however the next item is the "3" under "B" which is text as a vector path it is not called a "character" although it looks like one but a numbered glyph from a font table. We do see later that some of those numbers are stored as "text" and for your target it is mixed in with similar text in the same object.
Thus you need to call a PDF interpreter to give you a meaningful translation of all bits and pieces of objects so that you can extract the "right" text.
The easiest way for a "simple" one line target in a complex file is to use MuPDF to first tidy up the file
mutool clean -gggg -D infile.pdf outfile.pdf
combined with
PDFTOTXT -layout outfile.pdf outfile.txt
or similar to hopefully export that text on a line by line basis, such that you can consistently find your target instantly before ! or after ALTERNATE.
N.B Mutool convert to HTML would place the target value in a table entry AFTER the key word, and if the lines are consistent in number that would be a simpler way to find or grep.

How to replace text in a PDF using Python?

I have taken the code from another thread here that uses the library PyPDF2 to parse and replace the text of a PDF. The given example PDF in the thread is parsed as a PyPDF2.generic.DecodedStreamObject. I am currently working with a PDF that the company has provided me that was created using Microsoft Word's Export to PDF feature. This generates a PyPDF2.generic.EncodedStreamObject. From exploration, the main difference is that there is what appears to be kerning in some places in the text.
This caused two problems for me with the sample code. Firstly, the line if len(contents) > 0: in main seems to get erroneously triggered and attempts to use the key of the EncodedStreamObject dictionary instead of the EncodedStreamObject itself. To work around this, I commented out the if block and used the code in the else block for both cases.
The second problem was that the (what I assume are) kerning markings broke up the text I was trying to replace. I noticed that kerning was not in every line, so I made the assumption that the kerning markers were not strictly necessary, and tried to see what the output would look like with them removed. The text was structured something like so: [(Thi)4(s)-1(is t)2(ext)]. I replaced the line in the sample code replaced_line = line in replace_text with replaced_line = "[(" + "".join(re.findall(r'\((.*?)\)', line)) + ")] TJ". This preserved the observed structure while allowing the text to be searched for replacements. I verified this was actually replacing the text of the line.
Neither of those changes prevented the code from executing, however the output PDF seems to be completely unchanged despite the code appearing to work using print statements to check if the replaced line has the new text. I initially assumed this was because of the if block in process_data that determined if it was Encoded or Decoded. However, I dug through the actual source code for this library located here, and it seems that if the object is Encoded, it generates a Decoded version of itself which the if block reflects. My only other idea is that the if block that I commented out in main wasn't erroneously catching my scenario, but was instead handling it incorrectly. I have no idea how I would fix it so that it handles it properly.
I feel like I'm incredibly close to solving this, but I'm at my wits end as to what to do from here. I would ask the poster of the linked solution in a comment, but I do not have enough reputation to comment on SO. Does anyone have any leads on how to solve this problem? I don't particularly care what library or file format is used, but it must retain the formatting of the Word document I have been provided. I have already tried exporting to HTML, but that removes most of the formatting and also the header. I have also tried converting the .docx to PDF in Python, but that requires me to actually have Word installed on the machine, which is not a cross-platform solution. I also explored using RTF, but from what I found the solution for that file type is to convert it to a .docx and then to PDF.
Here is the full code that I have so far:
import PyPDF2
import re
def replace_text(content, replacements=dict()):
lines = content.splitlines()
result = ""
in_text = False
for line in lines:
if line == "BT":
in_text = True
elif line == "ET":
in_text = False
elif in_text:
cmd = line[-2:]
if cmd.lower() == 'tj':
replaced_line = "[(" + "".join(re.findall(r'\((.*?)\)', line)) + ")] TJ"
for k, v in replacements.items():
replaced_line = replaced_line.replace(k, v)
result += replaced_line + "\n"
else:
result += line + "\n"
continue
result += line + "\n"
return result
def process_data(obj, replacements):
data = obj.getData()
decoded_data = data.decode('utf-8')
replaced_data = replace_text(decoded_data, replacements)
encoded_data = replaced_data.encode('utf-8')
if obj.decodedSelf is not None:
obj.decodedSelf.setData(encoded_data)
else:
obj.setData(encoded_data)
pdf = PyPDF2.PdfFileReader("template.pdf")
# pdf = PyPDF2.PdfFileReader("sample.pdf")
writer = PyPDF2.PdfFileWriter()
replacements = {
"some text": "replacement text"
}
for page in pdf.pages:
contents = page.getContents()
# if len(contents) > 0:
# for obj in contents:
# streamObj = obj.getObject()
# process_data(streamObj, replacements)
# else:
process_data(contents, replacements)
writer.addPage(page)
with open("output.pdf", 'wb') as out_file:
writer.write(out_file)
EDIT:
I've somewhat tracked down the source of my problems. The line obj.decodedSelf.setData(encoded_data) seems to not actually set the data properly. After that line, I added
print(encoded_data[:2000])
print("----------------------")
print(obj.getData()[:2000])
The first print statement was different from the second print statement, which definitely should not be the case. To really test see if this was true, I replaced every single line with [()], which I know to be valid as there are many lines that are already that. For the life of me, though, I can't figure out why this function call fails to do any lasting changes.
EDIT 2:
I have further identified the problem. In the source code for an EncodedStreamObject in the getData method, it returnsself.decodedSelf.getData() if self.decodedSelf is True. HOWEVER, after doing obj.decodedSelf.setData(encoded_data), if I do print(bool(obj.decodedSelf)), it prints False. This means that when the EncodedStreamObject is getting accessed to be written out to the PDF, it is re-parsing the old PDF and overriding the self.decodedSelf object! Short of going in and fixing the source code, I'm not sure how I would solve this problem.
EDIT 3:
I have managed to convince the library to use the decoded version that has the replacements! By inserting the line page[PyPDF2.pdf.NameObject("/Contents")] = contents.decodedSelf before writer.addPage(page), it forces the page to have the updated contents. Unfortunately, my previous assumption about the text kerning was incorrect. After I replaced things, some of my text mysteriously disappeared from the PDF. I assume this is because the format is incorrect somehow.
FINAL EDIT:
I figure I'd put this in here in case anyone else stumbles across this. I never did manage to get it to finally work as expected. I instead moved to a solution to mimic the PDF with HTML/CSS. If you add the following style tag in your HTML, you can get it to print more like how you'd expect a PDF to print:
<style type="text/css" media="print">
#page {
size: auto;
margin: 0;
}
</style>
I'd recommend this solution for anyone looking to do what I was doing. There are Python libraries to convert HTML to CSS, but they do not support HTML5 and CSS3 (notably they do not support CSS flex or grid). You can just print the HTML page to PDF from any browser to accomplish the same thing. It definitely doesn't answer the question, so I felt it best to leave it as an edit. If anyone manages to complete what I have attempted, please post an answer for me and any others.

Wrong character encoding of rtf file

When I copy and paste the sentence How brave they’ll all think me at home! into a blank TextEdit rtf document on the Mac, it looks fine. But if I create an an apparently identical rtf file programatically, and write the same sentence into it, on opening TextEdit it appears as How brave they’ll all think me at home! In the following code, output is OK, but the file when viewed in TextEdit has problems with the right single quotation mark (here used as an apostrophe), unicode U-2019.
header = r"""{\rtf1\ansi\ansicpg1252\cocoartf1671\cocoasubrtf400
{\fonttbl\f0\fswiss\fcharset0 Helvetica;}
{\colortbl;\red255\green255\blue255;}
{\*\expandedcolortbl;;}
\paperw11900\paperh16840\margl1440\margr1440\vieww10800\viewh8400\viewkind0
\pard\tx720\tx1440\tx2160\tx2880\tx3600\tx4320\tx5040\tx5760\tx6480\tx7200\tx7920\tx8640\pardirnatural\partightenfactor0
\f0\fs24 \cf0 """
sen = 'How brave they’ll all think me at home!'
with open('staging.rtf', 'w+’) as f:
f.write(header)
f.write(sen)
f.write('}')
with open('staging.rtf') as f:
output = f.read()
print(output)
I’ve discovered from https://www.i18nqa.com/debug/utf8-debug.html that this may be caused by “UTF-8 bytes being interpreted as Windows-1252”, and that makes sense as it seems that ansicpg1252 in the header indicates US Windows.
But I still can’t work out how to fix it, even having read the similar issue here: Encoding of rtf file. I’ve tried replacing ansi with mac without effect. And adding ,encoding='utf8' to the open function doesn’t seem to help either.
(The reason for using rtf by the way is to be able to export sentences with colour-coded words, allow them to be manually edited, then read back in for further processing).

OK, I've found the answer myself. I needed to use , encoding='windows-1252' both when writing to the rtf file and also when reading from it.

pyPdf unable to extract text from some pages in my PDF

I'm trying to use pyPdf to extract and print pages from a multipage PDF. Problem is, text is not extracted from some pages. I've put an example file here:
http://www.4shared.com/document/kmJF67E4/forms.html
If you run the following, the first 81 pages return no text, while the final 11 extract properly. Can anyone help?
from pyPdf import PdfFileReader
input = PdfFileReader(file("forms.pdf", "rb"))
for page in input1.pages:
print page.extractText()

Note that extractText() still has problems extracting the text properly. From the documentation for extractText():
This works well for some PDF files,
but poorly for others, depending on
the generator used. This will be
refined in the future. Do not rely on
the order of text coming out of this
function, as it will change if this
function is made more sophisticated.
Since it is the text you want, you can use the Linux command pdftotext.
To invoke that using Python, you can do this:
>>> import subprocess
>>> subprocess.call(['pdftotext', 'forms.pdf', 'output'])
The text is extracted from forms.pdf and saved to output.
This works in the case of your PDF file and extracts the text you want.

This isn't really an answer, but the problem with pyPdf is this: it doesn't yet support CMaps. PDF allows fonts to use CMaps to map character IDs (bytes in the PDF) to Unicode character codes. When you have a PDF that contains non-ASCII characters, there's probably a CMap in use, and even sometimes when there's no non-ASCII characters. When pyPdf encounters strings that are not in standard Unicode encoding, it just sees a bunch of byte code; it can't convert those bytes to Unicode, so it just gives you empty strings. I actually had this same problem and I'm working on the source code at the moment. It's time consuming, but I hope to send a patch to the maintainer some time around mid-2011.

You could also try the pdfminer library (also in python), and see if it's better at extracting the text. For splitting however, you will have to stick with pyPdf as pdfminer doesn't support that.

I find it sometimes useful to convert it to ps (try with pdf2psand pdftops for potential differences) then back to pdf (ps2pdf). Then try your original script again.

I had similar problem with some pdfs and for windows, this is working excellent for me:
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 subprocess to run command from console:
import subprocess
try:
extInfo = subprocess.check_output('pdftotext.exe '+filePath + ' -',shell=True,stderr=subprocess.STDOUT).strip()
except Exception as e:
print (e)

I'm starting to think I should adopt a messy two-part solution. there are two sections to the PDF, pp 1-82 which have text page labels (pdftotext can extract), and pp 83-end which have no page labels but pyPDF can extract and it explicitly knows pages.
I think I need to combine the two. Clunky, but I don't see any way round it. Sadly I'm having to do this on a Windows machine.