Error: tesseract is not installed or it's not in your PATH

Question

I am new to pytesseract and OCR and I searched on the internet that this are the tools that is used to extract text from images. But, I have no prior knowledge of this tool. Right now, I am having this error: tesseract is not installed or it's not in your PATH. See README file for more information.
I don't know how to resolve this and I tried various solutions that I found on internet, which unfortunately didn't worked.

The error code:

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
FileNotFoundError                         Traceback (most recent call last)
~/.local/lib/python3.9/site-packages/pytesseract/pytesseract.py in run_tesseract(input_filename, output_filename_base, extension, lang, config, nice, timeout)
    254     try:
--> 255         proc = subprocess.Popen(cmd_args, **subprocess_args())
    256     except OSError as e:

/opt/conda/lib/python3.9/subprocess.py in __init__(self, args, bufsize, executable, stdin, stdout, stderr, preexec_fn, close_fds, shell, cwd, env, universal_newlines, startupinfo, creationflags, restore_signals, start_new_session, pass_fds, user, group, extra_groups, encoding, errors, text, umask)
    950 
--> 951             self._execute_child(args, executable, preexec_fn, close_fds,
    952                                 pass_fds, cwd, env,

/opt/conda/lib/python3.9/subprocess.py in _execute_child(self, args, executable, preexec_fn, close_fds, pass_fds, cwd, env, startupinfo, creationflags, shell, p2cread, p2cwrite, c2pread, c2pwrite, errread, errwrite, restore_signals, gid, gids, uid, umask, start_new_session)
   1822                         err_msg = os.strerror(errno_num)
-> 1823                     raise child_exception_type(errno_num, err_msg, err_filename)
   1824                 raise child_exception_type(err_msg)

FileNotFoundError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: 'tesseract'

During handling of the above exception, another exception occurred:

TesseractNotFoundError                    Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-7-96e86f1cd397> in <module>
      1 img = cv2.imread("Z++¦hler NSHV KTL-Durchlaufanlage-1.jpg")
----> 2 data = pytesseract.image_to_string(img)
      3 print(data)
      4 # plt.imshow(img)

~/.local/lib/python3.9/site-packages/pytesseract/pytesseract.py in image_to_string(image, lang, config, nice, output_type, timeout)
    407     args = [image, 'txt', lang, config, nice, timeout]
    408 
--> 409     return {
    410         Output.BYTES: lambda: run_and_get_output(*(args + [True])),
    411         Output.DICT: lambda: {'text': run_and_get_output(*args)},

~/.local/lib/python3.9/site-packages/pytesseract/pytesseract.py in <lambda>()
    410         Output.BYTES: lambda: run_and_get_output(*(args + [True])),
    411         Output.DICT: lambda: {'text': run_and_get_output(*args)},
--> 412         Output.STRING: lambda: run_and_get_output(*args),
    413     }[output_type]()
    414 

~/.local/lib/python3.9/site-packages/pytesseract/pytesseract.py in run_and_get_output(image, extension, lang, config, nice, timeout, return_bytes)
    285         }
    286 
--> 287         run_tesseract(**kwargs)
    288         filename = kwargs['output_filename_base'] + extsep + extension
    289         with open(filename, 'rb') as output_file:

~/.local/lib/python3.9/site-packages/pytesseract/pytesseract.py in run_tesseract(input_filename, output_filename_base, extension, lang, config, nice, timeout)
    257         if e.errno != ENOENT:
    258             raise e
--> 259         raise TesseractNotFoundError()
    260 
    261     with timeout_manager(proc, timeout) as error_string:

TesseractNotFoundError: tesseract is not installed or it's not in your PATH. See README file for more information.

Corresponding code:

!pip install tesseract
import pytesseract
import cv2
from PIL import Image
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
img = cv2.imread("meter.jpg")
data = pytesseract.image_to_string(img)
print(data)
# plt.imshow(img)

Let me first tell you that I am using Jupyterhub. Actually, I made an account on my university's jupyterhub. Additionally, I searched on net where one can use 'cmd' and resolve the problem. If so, then please brief me how to do so or I have to contact the Uni admin to solve this problem. Any help is appreciated!

Answer 1

Possible cause of this error is that you installed pytesseract with pip without installing the binary. If that is the case, you can install it as following:

on linux:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install tesseract-ocr
sudo apt install libtesseract-dev

on windows: download it from here then insert the binary path into your code

pytesseract.pytesseract.tesseract_cmd = 'C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Tesseract-OCR\\tesseract.exe'

on On Mac:

brew install tesseract

Answer 2

For Windows- in Case of the user have installed it for user only the path will be in the user folder Like: C:\Users\<User.Name>\AppData\Local\Tesseract-OCR\tesseract.exe

using same in code works fine

pytesseract.pytesseract.tesseract_cmd = r'C:\Users\John.Doe\AppData\Local\Tesseract-OCR\tesseract.exe'