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I have correctly written the following PowerShell command to traverse every folder and subfolder of a directory and display the contents of each such folders:

Get-ChildItem -Path "C:\whiskey\Tango\Charlie" –Recurse

I have also written a PowerShell script that correctly works and can extract text from each pdf file in a single folder.

cd "C:\whiskey"
$FILES= ls *.pdf
foreach ($f in $FILES) {
  & "C:\Program Files\xpdf-tools-win-4.02\bin32\pdftotext.exe" -enc UTF-8 "$f"
}

I am trying to combine both scripts in order to traverse all folders and subfolders and execute the pdftotext program. And so I wrote:

$files=Get-ChildItem -Path "C:\whiskey\Tango\Charlie" –Recurse
foreach ($f in $files){
    & "C:\Program Files\xpdf-tools-win-4.02\bin32\pdftotext.exe" -enc UTF-8 "$f"
}

; which is incorrect. I receive the following error: pdftotext.exe : I/O Error: Couldn't open file. Note none of the pdf files are protected.

Question: How do I correct this error?

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  • 1
    $Files should be an array of FileSystemInfo objects (FileInfo, DirectoryInfo). try using $f.FullName to get the full path of the file as a string or $f.Name if you just want the shortname.
    – Frank Thomas
    Jul 27, 2021 at 18:33
  • @FrankThomas something along the lines of $files=@(Get-ChildItem -Path "C:\Users\ahernandez\Desktop\BW\OCR\Mallinckrodt" –Recurse ) ?
    – user3195446
    Jul 27, 2021 at 18:45
  • 1
    based on what I'm seeing here stackoverflow.com/a/32915159/1624069 , I don't think that will work. the issue isn't the array, the issue is that the things in the array are not strings. I suggest that in your last line, you change "$f" to "$f.FullName" or "$f.tostring()".
    – Frank Thomas
    Jul 27, 2021 at 19:06

1 Answer 1

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This NOT an answer but an extended comment following @FrankThomas. It would appear the following script "works"

$FOLDERS=@(Get-ChildItem -Path "C:\whiskey\Tango\Charlie" –Recurse)
$FOLDERS #print contents of array
foreach ($f in $FOLDERS) {
  & "C:\Program Files\xpdf-tools-win-4.02\bin32\pdftotext.exe" -enc UTF-8 $f.FullName
}

Indeed it goes through each folder and subfolder and executes the pdftotext program and so correctly extracts the contents of the pdf file into a text file. However I still have an error message: pdftotext.exe : I/O Error: Couldn't open file "C:\whiskey\Tango\Charlie". I suspect the name of every folder was saved in the array $FOLDERS. Subsequently PowerShell passes the name of the folder to pdftotext; which will error since it cannot find a .pdf extension.

The following is the correct PS script:

$FOLDERS=@(Get-ChildItem -Path "C:\whiskey\Tango\Charlie" –Recurse -Filter *.pdf)
$FOLDERS #print contents of every folder
foreach ($f in $FOLDERS) {
  & "C:\Program Files\xpdf-tools-win-4.02\bin32\pdftotext.exe" -enc UTF-8 $f.FullName
}

I need to filter for just pdf files.

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1
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    ok, so thats because you are processing a directory. I recommend you change your first line to set the path to C:\whiskey\Tango\Charlie\*.pdf as shown in example 3 here: docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/… That should prevent you from processing directories or non-pdf files.
    – Frank Thomas
    Jul 27, 2021 at 19:41

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