Working on tables in pdf using python

python pdf pdf-scraping
sam picture sam · Mar 20, 2012 · Viewed 12.4k times · Source

I am working on a pdf file. There is number of tables in that pdf.
According to the table names given in the pdf, I wanted to fetch the data from that table using python.

I have worked on html, xlm parsing but never with pdf.
Can anyone tell me how to fetch tables from pdf using python?

Answer

Sandro Munda picture Sandro Munda · Mar 21, 2012

I think that you need a python parser library. The most famous is PDFMiner.

According to the documentation :

PDFMiner is a tool for extracting information from PDF documents. Unlike other PDF-related tools, it focuses entirely on getting and analyzing text data. PDFMiner allows one to obtain the exact location of text in a page, as well as other information such as fonts or lines. It includes a PDF converter that can transform PDF files into other text formats (such as HTML). It has an extensible PDF parser that can be used for other purposes than text analysis.

Related questions

Python module for converting PDF to text

Is there any python module to convert PDF files into text? I tried one piece of code found in Activestate which uses pypdf but the text generated had no space between and was of no use.

Read More
Extract / Identify Tables from PDF python

Are there any open source libraries that support table identification & extraction? By this I mean: Identify a table structure exists Classify the table from its contents Extract data from the table in a useful output format e.g. JSON / …

Read More
How to unlock a "secured" (read-protected) PDF in Python?

In Python I'm using pdfminer to read the text from a pdf with the code below this message. I now get an error message saying: File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pdfminer/pdfpage.py", line 124, in get_pages raise PDFTextExtractionNotAllowed(…

Read More