Python PDF Parsing with Camelot and Extract the Ta

Question

Camelot is a fantastic Python library to extract the tables from a pdf file as a data frame. However, I'm looking for a solution that also returns the table description text written right above the table.

The code I'm using for extracting tables from pdf is this:

import camelot
tables = camelot.read_pdf('test.pdf', pages='all',lattice=True, suppress_stdout = True)

I'd like to extract the text written above the table i.e THE PARTICULARS, as shown in the image below.

What should be a best approach for me to do it? appreciate any help. thank you

Answer 1

You can create the Lattice parser directly

            parser = Lattice(**kwargs)
            for p in pages:
                t = parser.extract_tables(p, suppress_stdout=suppress_stdout,
                                          layout_kwargs=layout_kwargs)
                tables.extend(t)

Then you have access to parser.layout which contains all the components in the page. These components all have bbox (x0, y0, x1, y1) and the extracted tables also have a bbox object. You can find the closest component to the table on top of it and extract the text.