[FIXED] Receiving "pytesseract not in your path" error on the exact same code that used to work fine

Issue

I wrote this code several months ago and wanted to pass through it to clean it up and add some new features. Its a simple tool I used to take a picture of my screen and get write-able words from it. I am on a new computer from the one I originally wrote the code on; however, I went through and installed every module via the pycharm module manager. However, I keep getting this error when I run the code even though I have located the package in my path. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I've looked up several different variations of my problem but they all seem to have different causes and fixes, of course, none of which work for me.

    if c ==2:
        img = ImageGrab.grab(bbox=(x1-5, y1-5, x2+5,y2+5))  # bbox specifies region (bbox= x,y,width,height)
        img_np = np.array(img)
        frame = cv2.cvtColor(img_np, cv2.COLOR_BGR2GRAY)
        c = 0
        x = 0
        string = str(pytesseract.image_to_string(frame)).lower()
        print(string)

This is the only section of the code that references pytesseract other than of course "import pytesseract". Hopefully I can get this code up and running again and the pytesseract module in general as it is integral to many of my scripts. Thanks in advance for your help.

  File "C:\Users\dante\Anaconda3\lib\site-packages\pytesseract\pytesseract.py", line 184, in run_tesseract
    proc = subprocess.Popen(cmd_args, **subprocess_args())
  File "C:\Users\dante\Anaconda3\lib\subprocess.py", line 709, in __init__
    restore_signals, start_new_session)
  File "C:\Users\dante\Anaconda3\lib\subprocess.py", line 997, in _execute_child
    startupinfo)
FileNotFoundError: [WinError 2] The system cannot find the file specified

During handling of the above exception, another exception occurred:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:/Users/dante/Desktop/DPC/processes/screen_to_text.py", line 29, in <module>
    string = str(pytesseract.image_to_string(frame)).lower()
  File "C:\Users\dante\Anaconda3\lib\site-packages\pytesseract\pytesseract.py", line 309, in image_to_string
    }[output_type]()
  File "C:\Users\dante\Anaconda3\lib\site-packages\pytesseract\pytesseract.py", line 308, in <lambda>
    Output.STRING: lambda: run_and_get_output(*args),
  File "C:\Users\dante\Anaconda3\lib\site-packages\pytesseract\pytesseract.py", line 218, in run_and_get_output
    run_tesseract(**kwargs)
  File "C:\Users\dante\Anaconda3\lib\site-packages\pytesseract\pytesseract.py", line 186, in run_tesseract
    raise TesseractNotFoundError()
pytesseract.pytesseract.TesseractNotFoundError: tesseract is not installed or it's not in your path```

Solution

The problem was in my lack of understanding of the module. pytesseract is not an OCR, it is simply a translator that allows users to use googles OCR. This means, in order to use this package, a user must have google's OCR installed ( I downloaded mine from here https://sourceforge.net/projects/tesseract-ocr-alt/files/).

This does NOT; however, solve the full problem. The pytesseract package needs to know where the actual OCR program is located. On line 35 of the pytesseract.py script there is a line that tells pytesseract where to find the actual google OCR tesseract program

tesseract_cmd = 'tesseract'

If you are on windows and you haven't manually added tesseract to your path (if you don't know what that means just follow the next steps) then you need to replace that line with the actual location of the google OCR on your computer. Replacing that line with

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

should allow you to run pytesseract assuming you have correctly installed everything. Took me quite a bit longer than i would care to admit to find the blatantly obvious solution to this issue, but hopefully people with this problem in the future resolve it faster than I did! Thanks and have a good day.

Answered By - dmantacos