Extracting Tables with Titles from PDFs and Converting Them into Structured Formats

Hello, fellow data enthusiasts! Today, I want to share my experience with a task many of us encounter: extracting tables from PDFs. If you’ve ever tried copying and pasting a table from a PDF, you know it can be quite a hassle. But fear not! With the help of the pdfplumber library, we can streamline this process and convert those tricky tables into structured data.

Why Use pdfplumber?

You might wonder why I recommend pdfplumber. It’s a straightforward and effective library for extracting text and tables from PDF documents

Setting Up Your Environment

Before we dive into the code, make sure you have pdfplumber and pandas installed. If you haven’t done this yet, run the following command:

pip install pdfplumber pandas

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Our Goal: Extract the Tables and Their Titles, Clean, and Structure

Here’s what we’ll do:

1. Extract Tables: We’ll use pdfplumber to extract tables from PDF documents.
2. Clean the Tables: After extraction, we’ll clean the tables to remove any inconsistencies, such as empty cells and merged cells.