Symbol not found in flat namespace

[caseydm]

Hi all. I'm getting this error when trying to import pdftotext in a flask project and cannot figure out how to resolve it.

ImportError: dlopen(/Users/casey/PycharmProjects/virtual environments/oadoi/lib/python3.9/site-packages/pdftotext.cpython-39-darwin.so, 0x0002): symbol not found in flat namespace '__ZN7poppler24set_debug_error_functionEPFvRKNSt3__112basic_stringIcNS0_11char_traitsIcEENS0_9allocatorIcEEEEPvES9_'

My installation details are:

• Mac M1
• pdftotext version 2.1.5
• Installed poppler with homebrew, set to version 22.04.0
• Ensured poppler visible to pdftotext by setting these environment variables in my shell:

  export LDFLAGS="-L/opt/homebrew/opt/openssl/lib -L/opt/homebrew/lib $LDFLAGS"
  export CPPFLAGS="-I/opt/homebrew/opt/openssl/include -I/opt/homebrew/include $CPPFLAGS"

[jalan]

Newer versions are more likely to work in your environment. Try again with the latest version.

https://github.com/jalan/pdftotext/blob/master/CHANGES.md

[caseydm]

Ok thank you!

[caseydm]

Hi reopening because I initially thought the latest release worked. But I am getting the same error with 2.2.2. My python version is 3.9.5.

[jalan]

Can you provide full details of your setup?

• macOS version
• how you installed python
• how you installed poppler
• how you installed this package

I don't have a mac to do any testing, but all tests are passing in CI on macOS 10.15 and 11 with Python 2.7-3.10.

[caseydm]

Sure! Here are the details:

• MacOS 12.3.1 (iMac with M1 chip)

• Installed python by going to https://www.python.org/downloads/macos/ and downloaded and installed python 3.9.12

• Installed poppler by going into a terminal window and running brew install poppler

• I used PyCharm to create a virtual environment for my project, selecting python 3.9

  

• Go into the activated environment and install with pip install -r requirements.txt. Within the requirements file there is a line pdftotext==2.2.2

Of note I tried to install on a Macbook Pro with similar config and got the same error message. Thank you for any help!

[jalan]

I wonder if there's some conflict between the things you installed via brew and the things you have installed otherwise. I would suggest first trying to see if you can get it all to work with only brew, on the command line, without a separately installed copy of Python and without PyCharm.

If you're willing to give it a try, here's how (as best I can remember):

• uninstall the Python you have
• install everything via homebrew in a new terminal. Make sure you aren't in any virtualenv when you do this: brew install pkg-config poppler python3 virtualenv
• check to make sure the right python3 is being found: which python3
• create a new virtualenv on the command line, pointed to that Python install. Something like python3 -m venv test_venv
• activate that env: source test_env/bin/activate
• pip install pdftotext
• test if it works: python -c 'import pdftotext'

If it works, you can then configure PyCharm to point to that existing virtual environment.

[caseydm]

That worked! Thank you so much.

[gree2]

(docs) ai@learn % pip freeze | grep pdftotext ~ pdftotext==2.2.2 (docs) ai@learn % python -c 'import pdftotext' ~ Traceback (most recent call last): File "", line 1, in ImportError: dlopen(/Users/ai/opt/anaconda3/envs/docs/lib/python3.10/site-packages/pdftotext.cpython-310-darwin.so, 0x0002): symbol not found in flat namespace '__ZN7poppler24set_debug_error_functionEPFvRKNSt3__112basic_stringIcNS0_11char_traitsIcEENS09allocatorIcEEEEPvES9' (docs) ai@learn [1] %

M2 macOS

[dmitry-viskov]

hi there! Faced with the same issue with M3 MacOS:

$ python
Python 3.12.4 (main, Jun 26 2024, 14:44:41) [Clang 15.0.0 (clang-1500.3.9.4)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import pdftotext
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
ImportError: dlopen(/Users/dmitry/.pyenv/versions/ag-venv/lib/python3.12/site-packages/pdftotext.cpython-312-darwin.so, 0x0002): symbol not found in flat namespace '__ZN7poppler24set_debug_error_functionEPFvRKNSt3__112basic_stringIcNS0_11char_traitsIcEENS0_9allocatorIcEEEEPvES9_'

Tried this using python from brew and python from pyenv

[jalan]

Did you follow the steps in https://github.com/jalan/pdftotext/issues/100#issuecomment-1124001193 ?

Since there's about 9000 ways to install python and set up virtual envs and install libs and install packages, without knowing the details of your particular setup, I can't do much.