I have this PDF file from European parliament, that you can download here. I have downloaded it and put it in R. It contains lists of names of Members of European Parliament (MEP) after a session of vote.
I want to extract just bits of these lists. Specifically, I want to extract and put in a table the names situated between "AVGIVNA RÖSTER" and 0, see the text highlighted in this screenshot.
Similar series of names repeat in the PDF. It refers to specific votes. I want them all in a table. MEP's names change but the structure remains, they are always situated between the bits "AVGIVNA RÖSTER" and "0".
I thought of using a startswith function and and a for loop"but I struggle with the writing.
Here is what I did so far:
library(pdftools)
library(tidyverse)
votetext <- pdftools::pdf_text("MEP.pdf") %>%
readr::read_lines()
You could try something like this
votetext <- pdftools::pdf_text("MEP.pdf") %>%
readr::read_lines()
a <- which(grepl("AVGIVNA RÖSTER", votetext)) #beginning of string
b <- which(grepl("^\\s*0\\s*$", votetext)) #end of string
sapply(a, function(x){paste(votetext[x:(min(b[b > x]))], collapse = ". ")})
Note that in the definition of b I use \\s* to find white space in a string.
In general you could first remove trailing and leading white space, see this question.
In your case you could do:
votetext2 <- pdftools::pdf_text("data.pdf") %>%
readr::read_lines() %>%
str_remove("^\\s*") %>% #remove white space in the begining
str_remove("\\s*$") %>% #remove white space in the end
str_replace_all("\\s+", " ") #replace multiple white-spaces with a singe white-space
a2 <- which(votetext2 == "AVGIVNA RÖSTER")
b2 <- which(votetext2 == "0")
result <- sapply(a2, function(x){paste(votetext2[x:(min(b2[b2 > x]))], collapse = ". ")})
result then looks like this:
`"AVGIVNA RÖSTER. Martin Hojsík, Naomi Long, Margarida Marques, Pedro Marques, Manu Pineda, Ramona Strugariu, Marie Toussaint,. + Dragoş Tudorache, Marie-Pierre Vedrenne. -. Agnès Evren. 0"