title: Converting a pdf to text/html in python so I can parse it
body: <p>I have the following sample code where I download a pdf from the European Parliament website on a given legislative proposal:</p>
  
  <p>EDIT: I ended up just getting the link and feeding it to adobes online conversion tool (see the code below):</p>
  
  <pre><code>import mechanize
  import urllib2
  import re
  from BeautifulSoup import *
  
  adobe = "http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/access_onlinetools.html"
  
  url = "http://www.europarl.europa.eu/oeil/search_reference_procedure.jsp"
  
  def get_pdf(soup2):
      link = soup2.findAll("a", "com_acronym")
      new_link = []
      amendments = []
      for i in link:
          if "REPORT" in i["href"]:
              new_link.append(i["href"])
      if new_link == None:
          print "No A number"
      else:
          for i in new_link:
              page = br.open(str(i)).read()
              bs = BeautifulSoup(page)
              text = bs.findAll("a")
              for i in text:
                  if re.search("PDF", str(i)) != None:
                      pdf_link = "http://www.europarl.europa.eu/" + i["href"]
              pdf = urllib2.urlopen(pdf_link)
              name_pdf = "%s_%s.pdf" % (y,p)
              localfile = open(name_pdf, "w")
              localfile.write(pdf.read())
              localfile.close()
  
              br.open(adobe)
              br.select_form(name = "convertFrm")
              br.form["srcPdfUrl"] = str(pdf_link)
              br["convertTo"] = ["html"]
              br["visuallyImpaired"] = ["notcompatible"]
              br.form["platform"] =["Macintosh"]
              pdf_html = br.submit()
  
              soup = BeautifulSoup(pdf_html)
  
  
  page = range(1,2) #can be set to 400 to get every document for a given year
  year = range(1999,2000) #can be set to 2011 to get documents from all years
  
  for y in year:
      for p in page:
          br = mechanize.Browser()
          br.open(url)
          br.select_form(name = "byReferenceForm")
          br.form["year"] = str(y)
          br.form["sequence"] = str(p)
          response = br.submit()
          soup1 = BeautifulSoup(response)
          test = soup1.find(text="No search result")
          if test != None:
              print "%s %s No page skipping..." % (y,p)
          else:
              print "%s %s  Writing dossier..." % (y,p)
              for i in br.links(url_regex="file.jsp"):
                  link = i
              response2 = br.follow_link(link).read()
              soup2 = BeautifulSoup(response2)
              get_pdf(soup2)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>In the get_pdf() function I would like to convert the pdf file to text in python so I can parse the text for information about the legislative procedure. can anyone explaon me how this can be done?</p>
  
  <p>Thomas</p>