Is there any way of extracting text as blocks?

[dmlls]

Hi everyone 👋🏻

I have been going through the documentation, issues and discussions but I haven't found an answer to the following question:

Does pdfplumber provide any way of extracting text as blocks? Something along the lines of Page.get_text("blocks") in PyMuPDF.

(Sorry in advance if this question has already been answered elsewhere.)

[jsvine]

Hi @dmlls, and thanks for your interest in this library. I'm not very familiar with MyMuPDF's get-blocks method, but adding something like that to pdfplumber is intriguing. (There isn't currently an equivalent method.) For single-column text, you could do something like this:

blocks = re.split(r"\n\n+", my_page.extract_text(layout=True, ...))

... but multi-column layouts would require a more sophisticated approach.