File Exchange Pick of the Week

Our best user submissions

Extract text from PDF documents

Jiro‘s pick this week is “Read text from a PDF document” by Derek Wood.

Ah, this is a nice entry. I was hoping for something like this. I keep track of my household expenses using MATLAB. I know, I know. Online banking now makes it easy to manage your expense, but I like using MATLAB to give me various views into my finances. One of the tasks I’m currently doing manually is entering of the expenses into my program. Some bank statements can be downloaded as CSV files, but one of my financial institutions only provide PDF files for the statements. For those statements, I would enter them in manually.

Derek’s pdfRead lets me automate this! His function, reads in any text information found in the PDF file. For a structured PDF file, like a bank statement, it’s fairly easy to extract out the necessary information from that text.

Just to show you how it works, I saved our MathWorks Blogs top page as a PDF file.

Then, I simply called pdfRead.

p = pdfRead('blogs.pdf');
p{1}
ans =
    'Get the inside view on MATLAB & Simulink!
     Cleve’s Corner: Cleve Moler 
     on Mathematics and 
     Computing
     Scientific computing, math & more
     Loren on the Art of MATLAB
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Comments

Give it a try and let us know what you think here or leave a comment for Derek.




Published with MATLAB® R2017a

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