Pdf text extraction

Skill cxcscmu/SkillLearnBench/skills/b1-one-shot-claude-opus-4-6/organize-messy-files/pdf-text-extraction

Extract text from PDF files using Python libraries (PyPDF2, pdfplumber) for content analysis and classification.From its SKILL.md

Install

npx -y skills add cxcscmu/SkillLearnBench --skill pdf-text-extraction

Assembled from the repository path, not quoted from the project. Check it against their README if it does not work.

SKILL.md

0.9 KB, 191 tokens by cl100k_base, as published. Nobody here has run it

PDF Text Extraction

Libraries

PyPDF2: Fast, good for simple text extraction
pdfplumber: Better for complex layouts, tables

Usage Pattern

import PyPDF2

def extract_pdf_text(filepath, max_pages=3):
    """Extract text from first few pages of a PDF for classification."""
    text = ""
    try:
        with open(filepath, 'rb') as f:
            reader = PyPDF2.PdfReader(f)
            for i, page in enumerate(reader.pages[:max_pages]):
                text += page.extract_text() or ""
    except Exception:
        pass
    return text

Tips

Reading only the first 2-3 pages is usually sufficient for topic classification
Some PDFs have no extractable text (scanned images) - fallback to filename
Always wrap in try/except as some PDFs may be corrupted

What ships with it

Read from the repository

Just SKILL.md. No reference files, no scripts.