pdftables-api

Python library to interact with the PDFTables.com API.

Supported versions of Python are listed in ci-build.yml.

Installation

pip: (requires git installed)

pip install git+https://github.com/pdftables/python-pdftables-api.git

pip: (without git)

pip install https://github.com/pdftables/python-pdftables-api/archive/master.tar.gz

For local development:

uv sync

Upgrading

If using pip, then use pip with the --upgrade flag, e.g.

pip install --upgrade git+https://github.com/pdftables/python-pdftables-api.git

Usage

Sign up for an account at PDFTables.com and then visit the API page to see your API key.

Replace my-api-key below with your API key.

import pdftables_api

c = pdftables_api.Client('my-api-key')
c.xlsx('input.pdf', 'output.xlsx')

Formats

To convert to CSV, XML or HTML simply change c.xlsx to be c.csv, c.xml or c.html respectively.

To specify Excel (single sheet) or Excel (multiple sheets) use c.xlsx_single or c.xlsx_multiple.

Extractor

You can specify which extraction engine to use when creating a Client. The available extractors are standard (default), ai-1, and ai-2.

For AI extractors (ai-1 and ai-2), you can also specify an extract option to control what content is extracted: tables (default) or tables-paragraphs.

from pdftables_api import (Client, EXTRACTOR_AI_1, EXTRACTOR_AI_2,
    EXTRACT_TABLES, EXTRACT_TABLES_PARAGRAPHS)

# Standard extractor (default)
c_standard = Client('my-api-key')

# AI extractors for complex documents
c_ai_1 = Client('my-api-key', extractor=EXTRACTOR_AI_1, extract=EXTRACT_TABLES)
c_ai_2 = Client('my-api-key', extractor=EXTRACTOR_AI_2, extract=EXTRACT_TABLES_PARAGRAPHS)

See PDFTables API documentation for details.

Test

Tests run with pytest: make test

Linting and formatting

• Format with make format
• Apply Ruff fixes with make fix

Configuring a timeout

If you are converting a large document (hundreds or thousands of pages), you may want to increase the timeout.

Here is an example of the sort of error that might be encountered:

ReadTimeout: HTTPSConnectionPool(host='pdftables.com', port=443): Read timed out. (read timeout=300)

The below example allows 60 seconds to connect to our server, and 1 hour to convert the document:

import pdftables_api

c = pdftables_api.Client('my-api-key', timeout=(60, 3600))
c.xlsx('input.pdf', 'output.xlsx')