How to parse a Non-tagged PDF containing tables using UiPath?

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1

Hello Team,

I am looking at doing a POC for extracting table information from a PDF file (non-tagged one). Is this doable in UiPath? If Yes, do we have BKMs on getting it done?

I tried using Read PDF Text from UiPath.Pdf.Activities. Eventhough the data got extracted successfully, I get the entire table data as a single field. Additionally, all the column values are shown mixed. I mean… the 1st line of 1st column shows up… followed by 1st line of 2nd column… followed by 1st line of Nth column…

After all this, i get 2nd line of 1st column… 2nd line of 2nd column… 2nd line of Nth column.

Due to this, I am not able to build the table back for my business needs. Is there a much simpler way to achieve this? May be i am doing things incorrectly?

Also the last column data for 3rd row keeps spanning to the next page. How can we identify and include that as a single row?

I am new to UiPath forum and using 2019.10.4 version. Please help.

Thanks,
Prakash

2

Refer the sample pdf here ABC Report.pdf (74.3 KB)

Refer the output parsed heretemp.txt (6.4 KB)

3

Use the screen scraping wizard instead. This will but the data in a datatable, which will let you keep your table alignment in the document.

4

Thanks @Anthony_Humphries. Can you share me a sample automation to do this? I tried using the screen scraping wizard which provides the output in a string variable but not datatable.

Is there a way to convert the string to datatable?

5

Use the data scraping wizard rather than the screen scraping one. The screen scraping wizard will provide you with a datatable in the end.

I referenced the wrong wizard before.

6

I tried the data scraping wizard and it returns me an error as “This control does not support data extraction. Please select a table cell”

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image1757×928 160 KB

7

Click on one of the cells in the table (e.g. choose ABC-1).

8

Thanks @Anthony_Humphries. I am unable to select a individual cell. Instead the entire document panel gets selected; and I receive the error again.
image

9

Hello<
In this video, I extract tables from PDF and write data in Excel:

0:25 Install PDF Activities
1:10 READ PDF text, Get PDF page count, Extract PDF
5:40 Read PDF with OCR
6:55 Join PDF and Manage PDF passwords
9:30 Extract Images From PDF and Export PDF as Image
12:00 Extract table from PDF use-cases 1 replace some spaces with | (one column has multiple words)
24:00 Run the robot to see the result
25:40 Extract Table from other PDF use-cases 2 delimiter is 2*spaces " " easy split
31:50 Extract Table from complex PDF use-cases 3 unstructured data the logic will be based on IsUpper and IsLower
40:25 Extract the price value from PDF

Thanks,
Cristian Negulescu