Reading data from PDF files into R

So... this gets me close even on a fairly complex table.

Download a sample pdf from bmi pdf

library(tm)pdf <- readPDF(PdftotextOptions = "-layout")dat <- pdf(elem = list(uri='bmi_tbl.pdf'), language='en', id='id1')dat <- gsub(' +', ',', dat)out <- read.csv(textConnection(dat), header=FALSE)

Just a warning to others who may be hoping to extract data: PDF is a container, not a format. If the original document does not contain actual text, as opposed to bitmapped images of text or possibly even uglier things than I can imagine, nothing other than OCR can help you.

On top of that, in my sad experience there's no guarantee that apps which create PDF docs all behave the same, so the data in your table may or may not be read out in the desired order (as a result of the way the doc was built). Be cautious.

Probably better to make a couple grad students transcribe the data for you. They're cheap :-)

The current package du jour for getting text out of PDFs is pdftools (successor to Rpoppler, noted above), works great on Linux, Windows and OSX:

install.packages("pdftools")library(pdftools)download.file("http://arxiv.org/pdf/1403.2805.pdf", "1403.2805.pdf", mode = "wb")txt <- pdf_text("1403.2805.pdf")# first page textcat(txt[1])# second page textcat(txt[2])