tika-python

Why we included this project

Most text-extraction jobs in Python start with a pile of binary files that need to become plain, queryable text, and this library handles that step by talking to Apache Tika's server under the hood. A single call returns the text and metadata from a PDF, a Word doc, a spreadsheet, or a presentation, and it will also identify the MIME type of an unknown file. That makes it a natural ingestion step before building a search index or feeding a retrieval pipeline, since you get consistent parsing across many formats instead of one parser per file type. The catch is that it needs Java 11 or newer running, because the library starts the Tika server in the background; for air-gapped environments there is a documented path using a local server jar. It has been around long enough and has enough contributors that you can treat the API as stable rather than betting on a young project.