Extracting Data into Columns using pdfplumber

[Pedroski55]

I'm starting to understand your problem!

Using reportlab I made a very simple pdf with 1 table of 4 rows and 5 columns. The table had borders.

The data for the table looks like this:

data= [['00', '', '02', '', '04'],
['10', '', '12', '', '14'],
['20', '', '22', '', '24'],
['30', '', '32', '', '34']]

As you can see, the columns 2 and 4 contain no data, just ''

Using this, I got the data from the table:

import pdfplumber
# Parse pdf
with pdfplumber.open(path2pdf + savename2) as pdf:
         # Get the first page of the object
    page = pdf.pages[0]
         # Get the text data of the page
    text = page.extract_text()
         # Get all the tabular data of this page
    tables = page.extract_tables()
         # Traversing table
    for t_index in range(len(tables)):
        table = tables[t_index]
                 # Traversing each row of data
        for data in table:
            print(data)

Which gives this as output, you can see the empty values, so they should be in your pandas df as NaN, I suppose.

Output:
['00', '', '02', '', '04']
['10', '', '12', '', '14']
['20', '', '22', '', '24']
['30', '', '32', '', '34']

But when I make a table with no borders, there is no table, just text:

>>> tables
[]
>>> text
'00 02 04\n11 13\n20 22 23 24\n30 31 32 34'
>>>

Now how to know which columns in which rows have nothing in them??

Think think!