What’s the best approach to scraping PDF documents online?

[Florianne Andrius]

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) with Tesseract is effective for scanned PDFs, though it requires more processing and is less accurate.

[Placidus Virgee]

If the PDFs follow a specific structure, regex helps isolate specific data fields like names, dates, or amounts from the raw text.

[Goutam Victor]

I sometimes convert PDFs to HTML before scraping, which allows for easier data extraction, especially with tabular data.

[Maksims Emmy]

Tabula is another great tool for extracting tables from PDFs. I use it to pull tabular data into a structured format for further processing.

[Ratan Carol]

For websites that host multiple PDFs, I use BeautifulSoup to locate and download all PDF links in bulk before extraction.

[Amatus Marlyn]

If the data is consistent, I automate the process to filter out only relevant pages, saving time when processing large documents.

[Filipp Maglocunos]

Cloud-based OCR solutions, like Google Vision API, handle complex PDFs more effectively, though there’s a cost involved.