Odtnhj

I'm trying to download a file and read it's info automatically, from the following link:

http://www.leyes.congreso.gob.pe/Documentos/2016_2021/Proyectos_de_Ley_y_de_Resoluciones_Legislativas/PL0361420181108.pdf

The problem is that when I try to read the information on the pdf, I get an error. It seems to happen on and off, I can't see a good reason why. The error appears to be Linux only.

library(pdftools)
link = "http://www.leyes.congreso.gob.pe/Documentos/2016_2021/Proyectos_de_Ley_y_de_Resoluciones_Legislativas/PL0361420181108.pdf"
download.file(link, "somefile.pdf")
pdf_info("somefile.pdf")
Error in poppler_pdf_info(loadfile(pdf), opw, upw) : 
 Embedded NUL in string.

What else I've tried:

• Tried downloading using mode = "wb"


• Tried downloading with httr using the write_disk method


• Tried downloading manually on windows and it works! :(

My suspicion is that it has to do with the way I'm downloading the file. But, I don't know what alternatives I should be trying.

So, this isn't going to work at all. There is no text in that document except for page break characters. It's all images.

If rJava works on your system and you can and are comfortable installing packages from untrusted sources such as GitHub them you can install pdfbox _{(note the security warning there as I haven't updated the pdfbox JARs but the only vuln is a potential process denial of service)} to validate this since it's less fragile than pdftools.

When I use the httr::write_disk() or curl::curl_download() methods to get the PDF (boy that takes a while in the U.S., too) I then did:

pdfbox::extract_text("~/Downloads/ill-bet-this-is-all-images.pdf")
## # A tibble: 14 x 2
## page text 
## <int> <chr>
## 1 1 "n" 
## 2 2 "n" 
## 3 3 "n" 
## 4 4 "n" 
## 5 5 "n" 
## 6 6 "n" 
## 7 7 "n" 
## 8 8 "n" 
## 9 9 "n" 
## 10 10 "n" 
## 11 11 "n" 
## 12 12 "n" 
## 13 13 "n" 
## 14 14 "n"

Boom: no text.

You'll need to use some of the rOpenSci image-to-text OCR tools to get anything meaningful out of that document.