Extract / Identify Tables from PDF python

python pdf scrape pdf-parsing pdf-scraping
Alexander McFarlane picture Alexander McFarlane · Feb 16, 2015 · Viewed 102.5k times · Source

Are there any open source libraries that support table identification & extraction?

By this I mean:

  1. Identify a table structure exists
  2. Classify the table from its contents
  3. Extract data from the table in a useful output format e.g. JSON / CSV etc.

I have looked through similar questions on this topic and found the following:

  • PDFMiner which addresses problem 3, but it seems the user is required to specify to PDFMiner where a table structure exists for each table (correct me if I'm wrong)
  • pdf-table-extract which attempts to address problem 1 but according to the To-Do list, cannot currently identify tables that are separated by whitespace. This is a problem as all tables in my PDFs are separated by whitespace!

Currently, I am thinking that I would have to spend a lot of time developing a Machine Learning solution to identify table structures from PDFs. Therefore, any alternative approaches would be more than welcome!

Answer

Ike picture Ike · Aug 21, 2017

After many fruitful hours of exploring OCR libraries, bounding boxes and clustering algorithms - I found a solution so simple it makes you want to cry!

I hope you are using Linux;

pdftotext -layout NAME_OF_PDF.pdf

AMAZING!!

Now you have a nice text file with all the information lined up in nice columns, now it is trivial to format into a csv etc..

It is for times like this that I love Linux, these guys came up with AMAZING solutions to everything, and put it there for FREE!

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