How to Extract Tables from PDF Files Using Python Code Tutorial

Time Stamp: March 6, 2023 9:35 AM
Source Node: 2422072

PDF files are a popular format for sharing documents online. They are easy to view, print, and share, but can be difficult to edit. Fortunately, Python has a library that makes it easy to extract data from PDF files. In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to use Python code to extract tables from PDF files.

The first step is to install the Python library that we’ll use for extracting data from PDF files. The library is called “pdfminer” and can be installed using the pip command:

pip install pdfminer

Once the library is installed, we can start writing our code. We’ll start by importing the library and creating a PDF document object. This object will allow us to access the contents of the PDF file:

from pdfminer.pdfdocument import PDFDocument

doc = PDFDocument(open(‘example.pdf’, ‘rb’))

Next, we’ll use the “find_tables()” function to locate all the tables in the PDF file. This function will return a list of table objects that we can use to access the table data:

tables = doc.find_tables()

Now that we have a list of table objects, we can loop through them and extract the data from each one. To do this, we’ll use the “extract_table()” function. This function will return a two-dimensional array containing the data from the table:

for table in tables:

data = table.extract_table()

print(data)

Finally, we can use the data from the tables to do whatever we need to do with it. For example, we could save it to a CSV file or use it to create a database table.

In this tutorial, we’ve shown you how to use Python code to extract tables from PDF files. With just a few lines of code, you can easily access the data from PDF tables and use it however you need.