How do you get whitespace from page.chars?

[inf3rnus]

Hi there again, not sure if I'm doing something stupid, but how do I extract whitespace characters from the page object?

Best,
Aaron

[jsvine]

Hiya! If you’re not seeing whitespace characters in page.chars, that’s typically because the software that generated the PDF did not include them but instead imitated whitespace by adding distance between the non-whitespace characters. As such, identifying “whitespace” ends up being a sort of mathematical exercise that varies from PDF to PDF but can typically be determined by calculating the difference between x0 of a char and x1 of the char that preceded it (assuming both chars are at the same y-position).