Search and Extract from PDF

[Chinnick]

Hello
I have a PDF file that i want to get data from.
I need to search through the pdf until i match what i am looking for and then collect the data that follows, is there a way to do this?
Somehow save the entrie pdf to a string or something?

Thanks in advance

[royUK]

I doubt very much if you can do this. A pdf is a format that basically prevents altering, copying etc. Yo can get software to convert to Excel, but I'm not sure how successful it would be

[Chinnick]

ok thanks, i wasn't sure if there was a way to read it into a string or not, thanks

[telyni]

The only possible way might be to OCR it to a text file (that's Optical Character Recognition, I think). Microsoft Office has a tool called Document Imaging which can do some OCR, and since it's an MS program, it can be controlled through VBA similarly to Excel or Access. I think you'd have to convert the PDF to a picture format like TIF before the document imaging program will read it though too.

[hoffey]

Chinnick,

This is very much possible, albeit with a good amount of work ahead of you. I currently use a freeware program called pdftotext to accomplish said task.

Here is a snippet of code from how I use it, but essentially you want to install the program in C:\PDF and go from there. Note there are many options with this program, and I use default conversion with a delimited import into Excel. You may or may not need to change this depending on what you are looking for.

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You can download the program here: http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/download.html