How Do I Grab Text File Output and Pass Down Pipeline? - powershell

Question

I've got an application that opens a winform and asks the user to input a PDF file. Because I can't read strings in PDF files easily, I need to convert it to a .txt. When the user clicks OK, the application does this.
The problem I'm having is now using the .txt file object and passing it to another command without knowing the name of it. When I try to pipe it to another command, it won't work because I don't have the path. I think this is because the output of conversion is the string "OK" and not the actual .txt file.
How can I convert the PDFs to text (I'm using Xpdf) and pass the converted file down the pipeline for further processing?
If the means I'm using is the problem, how can I accomplish this task another way?
Add-Type -AssemblyName System.Windows.Forms
$form = New-Object System.Windows.Forms.Form
$form.StartPosition = 'CenterScreen'
$button = New-Object System.Windows.Forms.Button
$form.Controls.Add($button)
$button.Text = 'Get file'
$button.Location = '10,10'
$button.Add_Click({
$ofd = New-Object system.windows.forms.Openfiledialog
$ofd.Filter = 'PDFs (*.pdf)|*.pdf'
$script:filename = 'Not found'
if ($ofd.ShowDialog() -eq 'Ok') {
$script:filename = $textbox.Text = $ofd.FileName
}
})
$buttonOK = New-Object System.Windows.Forms.Button
$form.Controls.Add($buttonOK)
$buttonOK.Text = 'Ok'
$buttonOK.Location = '10,40'
$buttonOK.DialogResult = 'OK'
$textbox = New-Object System.Windows.Forms.TextBox
$form.Controls.Add($textbox)
$textbox.Location = '100,10'
$textbox.Width += 50
$form.ShowDialog()
$output = & "C:\Users\eakinsa\Desktop\Style Guide Report\Includes\bin32\pdftotext" $filename
$output |
Get-Location -OutVariable textFile |
Select-String -Path $textFile -Pattern ed
Per Ansgar:
I amended the lines last few lines to, for now, maintain the default functionality of pdftotext where it creates the file in the same directory with the same name, as with his suggestion, I could easily replace .pdf with .txt on the end of the file path, thereby having the flexibility to pass the correct file path to subsequent functions. That made it so I was able to search the text file.
& "C:\users\eakinsa\Desktop\Style Guide Report\Includes\bin32\pdftotext" $filename
$pdf = Get-Item $filename
$textfile = $filename -replace '\.pdf$', '.txt'
Select-String -Path $textfile -Pattern ed

Answer 1

When you run pdftotext with just the input PDF as argument it creates the output text file in the same directory with the same basename and the extension txt.
& pdftotext C:\temp\foo.pdf # creates C:\temp\foo.txt
So you can build the text file path like this:
$pdf = Get-Item $filename
$textfile = Join-Path $pdf.DirectoryName ($pdf.BaseName + '.txt')
or like this:
$textfile = $filename -replace '\.pdf$', '.txt'
Alternatively you can tell pdftotext where to create the output file:
$textfile = 'C:\some\where\bar.txt'
& pdftotext $filename $textfile # creates C:\some\where\bar.txt