There are general rules to parse something, but to process it in a meaningful way you need some in-depth knowledge of the topic at hand. This is the difference between syntactic analysis (i.e., parsing) and semantic analysis (i.e., understanding). Now, parsing HTML can be messy, but it is always more reliable than trying to remove ads, sidebars, etc. For instance, in our library SmartReader we use an HTML parser to try to isolate the main content of a web page. In fact, often the parsing is the easy part, while understanding the parsed data is harder to do perfectly. The purpose of parsing is to free the data from its original format and use it for something useful. You build or use a parser to accomplish something else. Parsing is a process that can be interesting in itself, but it is rarely the end objective of a software. In the companion repository you will find the basic script we created for this article, together with the example PDFs we used. Thanks to competent and knowledgeable sysadmins you will be able to reliably extract tables from textual PDF, but you will get mediocre results, at best, with PDF made of images. We are going to see that you do not need developers for this process, but sysadmins. This way you can easily work with the data: you can process it, analyze it, and use it to take decisions. In this article we are going to see how to extract tables trapped into PDF files and put them in Excel files. The code for this article is on GitHub: PDFToExcel

Convert ocr pdf to excel