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pythonpdfpdf-parsingpdf-scraping

Extract / Identify Tables from PDF python

Are there any open source libraries that support table identification & extraction?

By this I mean:

  1. Identify a table structure exists
  2. Classify the table from its contents
  3. Extract data from the table in a useful output format e.g. JSON / CSV etc.

I have looked through similar questions on this topic and found the following:

  • PDFMiner which addresses problem 3, but it seems the user is required to specify to PDFMiner where a table structure exists for each table (correct me if I'm wrong)
  • pdf-table-extract which attempts to address problem 1 but according to the To-Do list, cannot currently identify tables that are separated by whitespace. This is a problem as all tables in my PDFs are separated by whitespace!

Currently, I am thinking that I would have to spend a lot of time developing a Machine Learning solution to identify table structures from PDFs. Therefore, any alternative approaches would be more than welcome!

Solution

  • You should definitely have a look at this answer of mine:

    and also have a look at all the links included therein.

    Tabula/TabulaPDF is currently the best table extraction tool that is available for PDF scraping.