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manjit.1486
manjit.1486
Known Participant
Jun 17, 2022 5:34 AM UTC
Question

Convert PDF To CSV

Hey Folks,

I am using an excel tools plugin for converting HTML to CSV. Now, there is a new requirement for converting PDF to CSV, and walking through the discussions and searches I haven't found any good match or solution. Can anyone help me with this? It would be highly appreciated.

4 replies

martinc3095
Known Participant
Jul 4, 2022 4:37 AM UTC

Hello, does the PDF file have a specific format? like tables or plain text? could you share an example?

martinc3095
Known Participant
Jul 4, 2022 4:55 AM UTC

you could use the following plugin to extract the text from the PDF (getpdftext function)

https://community.appian.com/b/appmarket/posts/pdf-tools

afther that you can use the extracted text to create a CSV file manually using the Text Doc from Template smartserivce

there is a youtube channel where they explain the creating a csv process: "Native Bean Turorials" the video is "Appain: CDT to CSV | English | NBT"

manjit.1486
manjit.1486Author
Known Participant
Jul 4, 2022 6:13 AM UTC

Thanks, Martin for the information. I already used getpdftext function to extract data from the pdf file. Then, I break the data according to requirements and parsed it to CDT. However, I managed to accomplish the goal and it's working right. 

I will definitely check the youtube link for additional information. Thanks

davidw871501
New Participant
Mar 30, 2026 12:31 PM UTC

That is a  real scenario lots of folks start with HTML to CSV and then bump into PDF to CSV which is a bit trickier because PDFs are not structured like HTML tables

what you can do depends on the kind of PDFs you have if they are mostly table‑based then using a tool that can extract tables first makes your life much easier

one simple approach outside your plugin environment is to use a PDF to CSV converter first and then save that Excel as CSV once it looks right inside Excel or Sheets
this gives you a structured intermediate format to work with

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