UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi,

I have several hundreds of PDFfiles number 01.pdf, 02.pdf, 03.pdf, etc in one folder. These are vey long documentd with a lot of information (text, tables, figures, etc). I need to extract the information asociated with one disease in particular (Varicella). The information I need to retrieve is the number of cases in each and every state and save it into a CSV file (please see attached examples). In the output file, the first column should have the data from file 01, the second one the data from file 02, so on and so forth. Thus, I will end up having a file that will look something like this:
I only need the information in tha particular page. The following page presents a different table listing the states in the same order but related to other diseases.
Any help will be greatly appreciated!

What you see in a formatted "pdf" file does not reflect in any form what is stored in the file.

The internal data of a "pdf" file has a lot of control and special characters that allow the
data to be displayed in an user friendly way.

In other words, you will not be able to directly read the data from a "pdf" file.

Hi,
it 'll be better if you use PERL script.
Cheers,
Ranga:-)

Yes, I came to realize about that problem when I tried to use AWK and SED to extract the information. I was thinking the maybe perl could get the job done. Unfortunately, I really do not understand perl enough to write the script. I was hoping someone might be able to provide some help though.

1. Write a script to convert a file in csv file and check it on your files.
2. Convert all files to csv files.
3. Extract needed information.

The first step is possible using a lot of tools - I used Poppler:

Code:

pdftotext -layout 01.pdf -| sed '$d' |  tail -n5 | sed -r 's/  +/,/g; s/ //g' 
Georgia,-,1,2,9,29,963,938,1283,-,10,5,19
SouthCarolina,-,74,63,158,19,4680,4362,9454,-,25,18,10
Alabama,-,14,28,24,8,1026,1026,1049,-,6,9,6
Florida,3,92,88,186,85,3222,3233,5409,-,13,9,4
California,2,199,169,582,60,5640,5259,10475,-,30,33,64

Try the first step (and check it on your files). Then it's easy to manage the second and third steps.

Thanks! I will try popler and go from there.