PDF Tablr

Version: 0.1.0

This is a Python 3 module and command line utility that analyzes XML output from the program pdftohtml in order to extract tables from PDF files and output the data as CSV.

For example:

pdftohtml -xml -stdout file.pdf | pdftable -f file%d.csv

See also pdftable -h and http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdftable

Original author: (c) 2009 Kyle Cronan kyle@pbx.org

This Python 3 implementation: (c) 2017 Phil Gooch

As per Kyle's code, this version is licensed under GPLv3. See LICENSE file.

Installation

Install pdftohtml via poppler-utils (Linux) or poppler (Mac OSX)

Then install the module

python setup.py install

or

pip install pdftablr

Command line usage

Extract each table into a separate CSV file:

pdftohtml -xml -stdout file.pdf | pdftable -f file%d.csv

Extract all tabular data into a single CSV file:

pdftohtml -xml -stdout file.pdf | pdftable -f file.csv

Module usage

from pdftablr.table_extractor import Extractor

# XML file created from pdftohtml
input_path = '/path/to/file.xml'

# Output CSV file
output_path = '/path/to/output.csv'

with open(output_path, 'w') as output_file:
    table_extractor = Extractor(output_file=output_file)

    with open(input_path) as f:
        table_extractor.read_file(f)
    
    tables = table_extractor.extract()
    for table in tables:
        table.output(writer=None)

TODO

• Investigate why Table.columns is sometimes initialised with empty columns
• Refactor all the file handling
• Execute pdftohtml within the code to allow PDF input