striprtf

Purpose

This is a library to convert Rich Text Format (RTF) files to plain text files. A lot of medical documents are written in RTF format which is not ideal for parsing and further processing. This library converts it to plain old text.

How to use it

from striprtf.striprtf import rtf_to_text
rtf = "some rtf encoded string"
text = rtf_to_text(rtf)
print(text)

If you want to use a different encoding than cp1252 you can pass it via the encoding parameter. This is only taken into account if no explicit codepage has been set.

from striprtf.striprtf import rtf_to_text
rtf = "some rtf encoded string in latin1"
text = rtf_to_text(rtf, encoding="latin-1")
print(text)

Sometimes UnicodeDecodingErrors can happen because of various reasons. In this case you can try to relax the encoding process like this:

from striprtf.striprtf import rtf_to_text
rtf = "some rtf encoded string"
text = rtf_to_text(rtf, errors="ignore")
print(text)

Online version

If you don't want to install or just try it out there is an online version available.

PostgreSQL

There is also a PostgreSQL version available from Raffael Mancini.

History

Pyth was not working for the rtf files I had. The next best thing was this gist: https://gist.github.com/gilsondev/7c1d2d753ddb522e7bc22511cfb08676

~~Very few additions where made, e.g. better formatting of tables. ~~

In the meantime some encodings bugs have been fixed. :-)