Extract text data from PDF files

Question

Is it possible to parse text data from PDF files in R? There is no suitable package for such an extraction , but has anyone tried or seen this in R?

Python has PDFMiner , but I would like to keep this analysis in R, if possible.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

On Linux systems, there is pdftotext with which I have had reasonable success. By default, it creates foo.txt from the expression foo.pdf .

However, text mining packages may have converters. A quick search rseek.org seems to be consistent with your crantastic search.

Answer 2

This is a very old stream, but for future reference: pdftools R extracts text from PDF files.

Answer 3

My colleague turned me to this handy open source tool: http://tabula.nerdpower.org/ . Install, download a PDF file and select a PDF table that requires data processing. Not a direct solution in R, but certainly better than manual labor.

Answer 4

A pure R solution can be:

 library('tm') file <- 'namefile.pdf' Rpdf <- readPDF(control = list(text = "-layout")) corpus <- VCorpus(URISource(file), readerControl = list(reader = Rpdf)) corpus.array <- content(content(corpus)[[1]]) 

then you will have the pdf lines in the array.

Answer 5

tabula The application for unpacking PDF tables is based on the command line application based on the Java JAR package, tabula-extractor .

The R tabulizer package provides an R-wrapper that makes it easy to transfer the path to a PDF file and extract data from data tables from.

Tabula will understand well where the tables are, but you can also specify which part of the page to look at by specifying the target area of ​​the page.

Data can be extracted from multiple pages, and if necessary, a different area for each page can be specified.

Example usage example: When documents become databases - Tabulizer R Wrapper for Tabula PDF Table Extractor .

Answer 6

 install.packages("pdftools") library(pdftools) download.file("http://www.nfl.com/liveupdate/gamecenter/56901/DEN_Gamebook.pdf", "56901.DEN.Gamebook", mode = "wb") txt <- pdf_text("56901.DEN.Gamebook") cat(txt[1]) 

Answer 7

I used an external conversion utility and called it from R. All files had a master table with the required information

Set the path to pdftotxt.exe and convert pdf to text

 exeFile <- "C:/Projects/xpdfbin-win-3.04/bin64/pdftotext.exe" for(i in 1:length(pdfFracList)){ fileNumber <- str_sub(pdfFracList[i], start = 1, end = -5) pdfSource <- paste0(reportDir,"/", fileNumber, ".pdf") txtDestination <- paste0(reportDir,"/", fileNumber, ".txt") print(paste0("File number ", i, ", Processing file ", pdfSource)) system(paste(exeFile, "-table" , pdfSource, txtDestination, sep = " "), wait = TRUE) } 

Answer 8

https://ropensci.org/blog/2016/03/01/pdftools-and-jeroen

This will help a lot.

It helps a lot when extracting PDF

Answer 9

There is a package that extracts data from PDF files using the R and API. There is no limit on the number of PDF files that can be converted at one time: https://github.com/expersso/pdftables