I have thousands of PDF files, composed only by tables, with this structure:
However, despite being fairly structured, I cannot read the tables without losing the structure.
I tried PyPDF2, but the data comes completely messed up.
import PyPDF2 pdfFileObj = open(pdf_file.pdf, 'rb') pdfReader = PyPDF2.PdfFileReader(pdfFileObj) pageObj = pdfReader.getPage(0) print(pageObj.extractText()) print(pageObj.extractText().split('n')[0]) print(pageObj.extractText().split('/')[0])
I also tried Tabula, but it only reads the header (and not the content of the tables)
from tabula import read_pdf pdfFile1 = read_pdf(pdf_file.pdf, output_format = 'json') #Option 1: reads all the headers pdfFile2 = read_pdf(pdf_file.pdf, multiple_tables = True) #Option 2: reads only the first header and few lines of content
Any thoughts?
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Answer
After struggling a little bit, I found a way.
For each page of the file, it was necessary to define into tabula’s read_pdf function the area of the table and the limits of the columns.
Here is the working code:
import pypdf from tabula import read_pdf # Get the number of pages in the file pdf_reader = pypdf.PdfReader(pdf_file) n_pages = len(pdf_reader.pages) # For each page the table can be read with the following code table_pdf = read_pdf( pdf_file, guess=False, pages=1, stream=True, encoding="utf-8", area=(96, 24, 558, 750), columns=(24, 127, 220, 274, 298, 325, 343, 364, 459, 545, 591, 748), )