Jiro‘s pick this week is“Read text from a PDF document”byDerek Wood.

Ah, this is a nice entry. I was hoping for something like this. I keep track of my household expenses using MATLAB. I know, I know. Online banking now makes it easy to manage your expense, but I like using MATLAB to give me various views into my finances. One of the tasks I’m currently doing manually is entering of the expenses into my program. Some bank statements can be downloaded as CSV files, but one of my financial institutions only provide PDF files for the statements. For those statements, I would enter them in manually.

Derek’spdfReadlets me automate this! His function, reads in any text information found in the PDF file. For a structured PDF file, like a bank statement, it’s fairly easy to extract out the necessary information from that text.

Just to show you how it works, I saved ourMathWorks Blogstop page as a PDF file.

Then, I simply calledpdfRead.

p = pdfRead('blogs.pdf'); p{1}

ans = 'Get the inside view on MATLAB & Simulink! Cleve’s Corner: Cleve Moler on Mathematics and Computing Scientific computing, math & more Loren on the Art of MATLAB Turn ideas into MATLAB Guy on Simulink Simulink & Model-Based Design Steve on Image Processing Concepts, algorithms & MATLAB File Exchange Pick of the Week Our best user submissions Stuart’s MATLAB Videos Watch and Learn Developer Zone Advanced Software Development with MATLAB Behind the Headlines MATLAB and Simulink behind today’s news and trends Hans on IoT ThingSpeak, MATLAB, and the Internet of Things Racing Lounge Best practices and teamwork for student competitions MATLAB Community MATLAB, community & more Recent Posts JUL 20 Send Bulk Sensor Data to ThingSpeak for Analysis by Hans Scharler JUL 18 MIT’s new robot can 3D print a building... by Lisa Harvey JUL 17 What is the Condition Number of a Matrix? by Cleve Moler JUL 14 Juno Delivers by Steve Eddins (1) JUL 14 What are the functional inputs and outputs of... by Guest Picker JUL 12 Developing a Function that Replicates an Excel Worksheet... by Stuart McGarrity JUL 10 Web Scraping and Mining Unstructured Data with MATLAB by Loren Shure JUL 7 Watering my Plants with Simscape Fluids by Guy Rouleau JUL 6 Don’t Mock Me! by Andy Campbell JUL 5 Building practical skills through student competitions by Christoph Hahn JUN 30 Cody Turns One Million by Ned Gulley (2)'

Comments

Give it a try and let us know what you thinkhereor leave acommentfor Derek.

Get the MATLAB code

Published with MATLAB® R2017a

Published with MATLAB® R2017a