Convert PDF files to database

[luise295]

Hi,

I have a PDF document of 21.708 pages, in which each page looks like this:

Is there any way to transform all these pages into a database?
The database must have the columns ACCT, NMBR, TYPE, TIME, USER-ID, DESCRIPTION, PREVIOUS VALUE, NEW VALUE.

Thanks!

[Juergen]

Hi,

I have used the R package tabulizer for a comparable task.

Here is the link: Introduction to tabulizer

You can combine the R package with KNIME by using the R Snippet node and scan over the document pages with a loop. In order to ease the further processing in KNIME, I would select ‘data.frame’ as the output format for the extract_tables function in the R script.

Once you have the data (one page or the complete document) in KNIME you can feed a database……

Best regards,

Jürgen

PS Presumably you will find comparable functionalities in Python……

[mlauber71]

@Juergen

R package tabulizer

Here is an example how to use it:

Automate pdf reader and convert data to excel table with correct column mappings

I had problems with the mentioned KNIME only approaches so I tried something with KNIME and R. It has these steps: run and configure R’s “tabulizer” it seems the settings ‘stream’ and GUESS are working best in your case it would extract one table from each page and try to find headers and bring them to a table not all information would be in the same columns (we come to that later) the tables are saved as single CSVs (with their varying structure) then they would be imported into KNIME forcing…

Also there was a challenge how to extract a table from a pdf file with this solution.

https://hub.knime.com/search?type=Workflow&tag=justknimeit-15&sort=best

A python option could be Camelot.

How to extract from and divide a pdf with text and tables into rows and then search for a row by a word it contains.

@Ami1 the solutions to the KNIME challenge 015 might Indeed be a starting point. Then there is an approach using R package: You can search for a word in a PDF file and extract the location: To extract tables there is an option to use tabulizer Or you can try and use the python package camelot