I did however find pdf2html. It will be a breeze to run it and then extract the data from the html that it produces.

<whine>But! I don't want to...<\whine>

Why not? Assuming you have the HTML in a single scalar:

use HTML::TokeParser::Simple;
my $p = HTML::TokeParser::Simple->new( \$html );

while ( my $token = $p->get_token ) {
    next unless $token->is_text;
    print $token->return_text;
}
[download]

There, that wasn't so hard, was it? (note that that example was pretty much cut-n-pasted directly from the POD)

Oh, and you have the slash backwards on that final whine :)

Cheers,
Ovid

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You could have Perl make system calls to pdf2html, then use HTML::Parser to get all the data out.

Just my two cents.

John J Reiser
newrisedesigns.com

Thank you for a quick response.

I really just want plain text but HTML will do as I can I can strip the HTML markup out. I was hoping to stay away from system calls and external programs as much as possible. I am hoping that someone will be able to provide me with the key piece of information that I am missing. In the mean time, I will start coding a version that makes a system call to pdf2html.

And Ovid, you will notice that they are all backslashes... ;)

Okay, it's not great but it is a good start. It works for some of the PDF files that I have but not all of them. If the PDF file contains columns of data the output from pdf2html is terrible.

As always YMMV.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use HTML::TokeParser::Simple;

my $file = $ARGV[0]; # base file name (no extension)
my $pdf = "$file.pdf"; # the pdf file to fix
my $txt = "$file.txt"; # the file to export as text
my $pdf2html = "pdftohtml.exe"; # the executable to create the html
my $html = "$file.html"; # the html file to create

system("$pdf2html -noframes $pdf"); # create the html file

my $p = HTML::TokeParser::Simple->new($html); # create the html parser

open(TXT, ">", $txt) || die "Cannot open $txt, "; # create the text fi
+le
while (my $token = $p->get_token) {
# print TXT "\n" if ($token->is_start_tag('br')); # may be needed for 
+some files
  next if ! $token->is_text; # skip to next token if it's not text
  my $text = $token->return_text;
  $text =~ s/&/&/g; # add any html filters here
  print TXT $text;
}
close(TXT);
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