How to read line by line in pdf file and create a CSV

Question

Here is my pdf enter image description here I found THIS and I used it to scrap my pdf.

6 BEDROOMS
NameAddressUnitSizeKeyRentSq FtMove in DateNotesTenant
Prop #
Texan 261009 West 26th3076x3$4,6952,1368/15/14$1,000 Bonus (1) Park -

Its pretty mixed up. or Is is because the PDF is formatted in a way which is unreadable? I thought there was a way I could scrap each row and create a CSV with the columns by iteration or something.

Like populate a CSV with columns

T26 | Texan 26          | 1009 West 26th | 307      | 6x3 | ... 
e075| Texan North Campus| 5117 N Lamar   |See below | 6x3 |...

Is there a way around this?

Could you provide the actual PDF document? – sherwoor Sep 17 '14 at 16:43 — sherwoor, Sep 17 '14 at 16:43

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Sep 17 '14 at 16:48

0

The code snippet that you used has provided some practically unusable data, I don't think that is the way to go. Scraping from a PDF is generally rather difficult, however take a look at pdftables.com: they provide an API for scraping tables from PDF documents which I've found works in the majority of cases - it's your best chance at this i'd say.

answered Sep 17 '14 at 16:48

sherwoor

185
6

Yes I see pdftables.com is working, but I wanted to create a script to do it. – Alexxio Sep 17 '14 at 16:57
They have an API which you can include in your script. – sherwoor Sep 18 '14 at 12:29

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Nov 09 '18 at 18:49

You can use Camelot (which is a Python library) to create a script that extracts tabular data from your PDF and export it to a CSV. You can check out the documentation at: http://camelot-py.readthedocs.io. It would be helpful if you could post a link to your PDF. Here's a generic code example:

>>> import camelot
>>> tables = camelot.read_pdf('file.pdf')
>>> type(tables[0].df)
<class 'pandas.core.frame.DataFrame'>
>>> tables[0].to_csv('file.csv')

Disclaimer: I'm the author of the library.

How to read line by line in pdf file and create a CSV

2 Answers2