A table like that will not be extracted nicely via the Extract tables from PDF action. You will need to use the Extract text from PDF action and then parse the text to create a table variable.
Here's a sample flow that could handle the table you marked as red in your PDF file:
What it does is as follows:
- Creates a new table and deletes the empty row (as it is impossible to create a table without the empty row)
- Extracts the text from your PDF file
- Parses the text with regex to retrieve the relevant lines
- Splits the retrieved text into a list with an item for each line
- Loops through the lines and splits it by space to get each item separately
- If the line contains 5 items, inserts it directly into the table created in step 1, else, inserts it with some blank values in between.
Here's a snippet you can copy and paste directly into PAD to have the actions created automatically for you:
Variables.CreateNewDatatable InputTable: { ^['Index No.', 'Unit', 'Pack Breakup', 'Pack', 'Quantity'], [$'''''', $'''''', $'''''', $'''''', $''''''] } DataTable=> DataTable
Variables.DeleteRowFromDataTable DataTable: DataTable RowIndex: 0
Pdf.ExtractTextFromPDF.ExtractText PDFFile: $'''C:\\RPA\\pad_pdf_file.pdf''' DetectLayout: False ExtractedText=> ExtractedPDFText
Text.ParseText.RegexParseForFirstOccurrence Text: ExtractedPDFText TextToFind: $'''(?<=MULTIPACK\\r\\nQUANTITY\\r\\nIndex No..+\\r\\n)(.+\\r\\n)+?.+(?=\\r\\n\\d+\\s\\d+\\r\\n.+PREPACK)''' StartingPosition: 0 IgnoreCase: False OccurrencePosition=> Position Match=> Match
Text.SplitText.Split Text: Match StandardDelimiter: Text.StandardDelimiter.NewLine DelimiterTimes: 1 Result=> TextList
LOOP FOREACH TextLine IN TextList
Text.SplitText.Split Text: TextLine StandardDelimiter: Text.StandardDelimiter.Space DelimiterTimes: 1 Result=> TextLineList
IF TextLineList.Count = 5 THEN
Variables.AddRowToDataTable.AppendRowToDataTable DataTable: DataTable RowToAdd: TextLineList
ELSE
Variables.AddRowToDataTable.AppendRowToDataTable DataTable: DataTable RowToAdd: [TextLineList[0], '', TextLineList[1], '', TextLineList[2]]
END
END
Note you will need to change the file path in the Extract text from PDF action for this to work.
An important note here: this flow will not work for a document where the table is split over two separate pages. That's because it parses the text using the headers and the totals after the table. Since the headers are repeated for each page and the totals are only there in the last page where the table ends, if your table is split over two pages, this flow would include the headers as text lines, so you would need to handle that.
In order to handle it, you could add some extra conditions into the loop like this:
This will skip the part of the loop that splits the line and inserts it into the table, if the line contains some of the text that should be in the headers.
Here's a snippet with the total flow:
Variables.CreateNewDatatable InputTable: { ^['Index No.', 'Unit', 'Pack Breakup', 'Pack', 'Quantity'], [$'''''', $'''''', $'''''', $'''''', $''''''] } DataTable=> DataTable
Variables.DeleteRowFromDataTable DataTable: DataTable RowIndex: 0
Pdf.ExtractTextFromPDF.ExtractText PDFFile: $'''C:\\RPA\\pad_pdf_file.pdf''' DetectLayout: False ExtractedText=> ExtractedPDFText
Text.ParseText.RegexParseForFirstOccurrence Text: ExtractedPDFText TextToFind: $'''(?<=MULTIPACK\\r\\nQUANTITY\\r\\nIndex No..+\\r\\n)(.+\\r\\n)+?.+(?=\\r\\n\\d+\\s\\d+\\r\\n.+PREPACK)''' StartingPosition: 0 IgnoreCase: False OccurrencePosition=> Position Match=> Match
Text.SplitText.Split Text: Match StandardDelimiter: Text.StandardDelimiter.NewLine DelimiterTimes: 1 Result=> TextList
LOOP FOREACH TextLine IN TextList
IF (Contains(TextLine, 'MULTIPACK', False) OR Contains(TextLine, 'QUANTITY', False) OR Contains(TextLine, 'Index No', False)) = True THEN
NEXT LOOP
END
Text.SplitText.Split Text: TextLine StandardDelimiter: Text.StandardDelimiter.Space DelimiterTimes: 1 Result=> TextLineList
IF TextLineList.Count = 5 THEN
Variables.AddRowToDataTable.AppendRowToDataTable DataTable: DataTable RowToAdd: TextLineList
ELSE
Variables.AddRowToDataTable.AppendRowToDataTable DataTable: DataTable RowToAdd: [TextLineList[0], '', TextLineList[1], '', TextLineList[2]]
END
END
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