Dealing with merged table cells

[blmoistawinde]

I'm doing table extraction on a PDF generated by Word, and there are many merged cells in the table.

Now if I use extract_table, I would get a table like this, with many None cells.

I want to praise this tool for its excellent accuracy on OCR! And I would be even more grateful if there is a new, easy function that can deal with these merged cells properly.

For example, I would expect the 3rd column to be also “指标”, cell at loc[0,"项目"] to be also "项目", and cell at loc[2,None] to be also 8.0, etc. To achieve this now, I must use complex fillna logics considering the positions of cells.

Thanks a lot!

[jsvine]

Thank you, @blmoistawinde. And better handling of merged cells is a good idea. I'll consider it for a future release. In the meantime, could you provide of the following?:

• A PDF containing merged cells (such as the one you have screenshotted above)
• The code you are using to extract the table
• A screenshot or text file demonstrating how you would prefer the extracted table to appear

[blmoistawinde]

Ok, below is a similar example I've made up with Microsoft Word.
example_merged.pdf

The code I used:

#coding=utf-8
import pdfplumber
import pandas as pd
import numpy as np

pdf = pdfplumber.open("example_merged.pdf")
p0 = pdf.pages[0]
table2df = lambda table: pd.DataFrame(table[1:], columns=table[0])
tables = table2df(p0.extract_table())
tables

And I got this.

The expected output is:

By the way, the final structure I'd like to extract from this complex table is:
A pivot table like this:

and a contingence table like this:

I was wondering if there exists another elegant solution for the merged cells, but I think the above one I've presented would be a reasonable one, especially for the data[8.0].

Thanks a lot!

[jsvine]

Thanks! This will be a helpful reference when I attempt to improve the handling of merged cells.

[binzhouchn]

Hi jsvine, is there any page merge operation available?

[jsvine]

@binzhouchn No, currently there is not a page merge operation available.

[rohaan2614]

Hi, can someone please confirm the merged-cell capability has been included in the releases after July 2020?

Thanks

[jsvine]

@rohaan2614 There is no specific merged-cell capability at the moment.

[pribadihcr]

+1

[jvfd3]

+1

[Guyodub]

@jsvine is the merged capability available in 2024

[san2sreshta]

@jsvine Is merged cell parsing available in 2024?