pdf2data 2019.1

Tools for extracting tabular data from PDFs, using pdfminer

Have some tabluar data locked away in PDF format? Like the financial information at my esteemed place of current employment, which looks roughly like this:

Tabula not plausible for the volume of information you’re needing to extract? (Thousands of pages in my case.) This package may be what you’re looking for. I should note that this is a simple tool aimed at very structured data. Tabula can handle far messsier situations than this package. Misaligned cell heights? Word-wrapped cells? Spanning cells? You’re better off with Tabula. Computer-generated report PDFs that urgently want to be in a SQLite database? You’ve come to the right place.

Reading UIUC Financials

If you came here looking to read financial statements at UIUC, there’s a page just for you.

Package Overview

This package builds on pdfminer to make it easy to absorb computer-generated tabular data in PDF form and produce JSON-like lists of row dictionaries. The basic workflow is as follows:

# identify top of table
top_y0 = find_attr_group_matching(
        ["Last Name", "First Name"], "y0", page_it.lines)

# extract text snippets making up table body
table_lines = [l for l in page_it.lines if l.y0 < top_y0]

# extract header text snippets
headers = [l for l in page_it.lines if abs(l.y0 - top_y0) < 5]

# extract table
rows = find_row_table(headers, table_lines)
rows = merge_overlapping_rows(rows, "y0", "y1")

This will leave rows to be a data structure roughly like the following:

{'Amount ': TL('           60.00 '), 'Last Name': TL('Lidstad'), 'Address': TL('62\xa0Mississippi\xa0River\xa0Blvd\xa0N'), 'First Name': TL('Dick\xa0&\xa0Peg'), 'City': TL('Saint\xa0Paul'), 'State': TL('MN'), 'Zip': TL('55104'), 'Occupation': TL('retired'), 'Date': TL('10/12/2012')}
{'Amount ': TL('           60.00 '), 'Last Name': TL('Strom'), 'Address': TL('1229\xa0Hague\xa0Ave'), 'First Name': TL('Pam'), 'City': TL('St.\xa0Paul'), 'State': TL('MN'), 'Zip': TL('55104'), 'Date': TL('9/12/2012')}
{'Amount ': TL('           60.00 '), 'Last Name': TL('Seeba'), 'Address': TL('1399\xa0Sheldon\xa0St'), 'First Name': TL('Louise\xa0&\xa0Paul'), 'City': TL('Saint\xa0Paul'), 'State': TL('MN'), 'Zip': TL('55108'), 'Occupation': TL('BOE'), 'Employer': TL('City\xa0of\xa0Saint\xa0Paul'), 'Date': TL('10/12/2012')}
{'Amount ': TL('           60.00 '), 'Last Name': TL('Schumacher\xa0/\xa0Bales'), 'First Name': TL('Douglas\xa0L.\xa0/\xa0Patricia\xa0948\xa0County\xa0Rd.\xa0D\xa0W'), 'City': TL('Saint\xa0Paul'), 'State': TL('MN'), 'Zip': TL('55126'), 'Date': TL('10/13/2012')}
{'Amount ': TL('           75.00 '), 'Last Name': TL('Abrams'), 'Address': TL('238\xa08th\xa0St\xa0east'), 'First Name': TL('Marjorie'), 'City': TL('St\xa0Paul'), 'State': TL('MN'), 'Zip': TL('55101'), 'Occupation': TL('Retired'), 'Employer': TL('Retired'), 'Date': TL('8/8/2012')}

See this demo for a minimal, fully functional example. There is some documentation in the source code. In addition, there are some (sparsely documented) facilities for inserting the obtained data into a SQLite3 database and the full script I use to make my financial info digestible.

The package is Python 3-only. Install using:

pip install pdf2data

https://github.com/inducer/pdf2data

Copyright 2019 Andreas Kloeckner

Released under the MIT License

In terms of support, if this doesn’t do what you need, you’re likely to be on your own. I’m happy to take patches, but I’m unlikely to have to time to fix your use case.