[948] Extract PDF tables that have cells with multiple lines

If your PDF tables have cells with multiple lines, and you want to merge those lines within the same cell when extracting the table, you might need a more advanced approach. One way to handle this is by using the tabula-py library along with the lattice option, which can be more effective in dealing with more complex tables. Additionally, you may need to post-process the extracted data to handle multi-line cells.

Here is an example:

import tabula
import pandas as pd
 
# Specify the path to your PDF file
pdf_path = 'path/to/your/file.pdf'
 
# Read PDF and extract tables using lattice option
tables = tabula.read_pdf(pdf_path, pages='all', multiple_tables=True, lattice=True)
 
# Function to merge cells with multiple lines
def merge_multiline_cells(table):
    for col in table.columns:
        table[col] = table[col].apply(lambda x: ' '.join(str(cell) for cell in x) if isinstance(x, list) else x)
    return table
 
# Iterate through the extracted tables
for i, table in enumerate(tables, start=1):
    # Merge cells with multiple lines
    table = merge_multiline_cells(table)
    
    # Post-process the table as needed
    # (e.g., handle headers, data type conversions, etc.)
    
    # Print the processed table
    print(f"Table {i}:\n{table}\n")

In this exmaple, the lattice=True option is used when calling tabula.read_pdf to improve the accuracy of table extraction, especially for tables with complex structures. The merge_multiline_cells function is defined to concatnate the text in cells with multiple lines.

Keep in mind that the success of this approach depends on the specific structure of the PDF you are working with. You may need to further customize the post-processing steps based on the characteristics of your tables. If this approach doesn't meet your needs, you may want to explore other libraries or methods tailored to the specific requirements of your PDF documents.