Extract / Identify Tables from PDF python

You should definitely have a look at this answer of mine:

• Extracting table contents from a collection of PDF files

and also have a look at all the links included therein.

Tabula/TabulaPDF is currently the best table extraction tool that is available for PDF scraping.

I'd just like to add to the very helpful answer from Kurt Pfeifle - there is now a Python wrapper for Tabula, and this seems to work very well so far: https://github.com/chezou/tabula-py

This will convert your PDF table to a Pandas data frame. You can also set the area in x,y co-ordinates which is obviously very handy for irregular data.

After many fruitful hours of exploring OCR libraries, bounding boxes and clustering algorithms - I found a solution so simple it makes you want to cry!

I hope you are using Linux;

pdftotext -layout NAME_OF_PDF.pdf

AMAZING!!

Now you have a nice text file with all the information lined up in nice columns, now it is trivial to format into a csv etc..

It is for times like this that I love Linux, these guys came up with AMAZING solutions to everything, and put it there for FREE!