Camelot: PDF Table Extraction for Humans

Camelot is a Python library that can help you extract tables from PDFs!

Note: You can also check out Excalibur, the web interface to Camelot!

Here's how you can extract tables from PDFs. You can check out the PDF used in this example here.

>>> import camelot
>>> tables = camelot.read_pdf('foo.pdf')
>>> tables
<TableList n=1>
>>> tables.export('foo.csv', f='csv', compress=True) # json, excel, html, markdown, sqlite
>>> tables[0]
<Table shape=(7, 7)>
>>> tables[0].parsing_report
{
    'accuracy': 99.02,
    'whitespace': 12.24,
    'order': 1,
    'page': 1
}
>>> tables[0].to_csv('foo.csv') # to_json, to_excel, to_html, to_markdown, to_sqlite
>>> tables[0].df # get a pandas DataFrame!

Camelot also comes packaged with a command-line interface!

Note: Camelot only works with text-based PDFs and not scanned documents. (As Tabula explains, "If you can click and drag to select text in your table in a PDF viewer, then your PDF is text-based".)

You can check out some frequently asked questions here.

Why Camelot?

• Configurability: Camelot gives you control over the table extraction process with tweakable settings.
• Metrics: You can discard bad tables based on metrics like accuracy and whitespace, without having to manually look at each table.
• Output: Each table is extracted into a pandas DataFrame, which seamlessly integrates into ETL and data analysis workflows. You can also export tables to multiple formats, which include CSV, JSON, Excel, HTML, Markdown, and Sqlite.

See comparison with similar libraries and tools.

Support the development

If Camelot has helped you, please consider supporting its development with a one-time or monthly donation on OpenCollective.

Installation

Using conda

The easiest way to install Camelot is with conda, which is a package manager and environment management system for the Anaconda distribution.

$ conda install -c conda-forge camelot-py

Using pip

After installing the dependencies (tk and ghostscript), you can also just use pip to install Camelot:

$ pip install "camelot-py[base]"

From the source code

After installing the dependencies, clone the repo using:

$ git clone https://www.github.com/camelot-dev/camelot

and install Camelot using pip:

$ cd camelot
$ pip install ".[base]"

Documentation

The documentation is available at http://camelot-py.readthedocs.io/.

Wrappers

• camelot-php provides a PHP wrapper on Camelot.

Contributing

The Contributor's Guide has detailed information about contributing issues, documentation, code, and tests.

Versioning

Camelot uses Semantic Versioning. For the available versions, see the tags on this repository. For the changelog, you can check out HISTORY.md.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License, see the LICENSE file for details.