Recognize PDF table using R

Question

I\'m trying to extract data from tables inside some pdf reports.

I\'ve seen some examples using either pdftools and similar packages I was successful in getting the

Answer 1

I would love to know the answer to this as well. But from my experience, you need to use regular expressions to get the data in a format that you want. You can see the following as an example:

library(pdftools)
dat <- pdftools::pdf_text("https://s3-eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/de-hrzg-khl/kh-ffe/public/artikel-pdfs/Free_PDF/BF_LISTE_20016.pdf")
dat <- paste0(dat, collapse = " ")
pattern <- "Berufsfeuerwehr\\s+Straße(.)*02366.39258"
extract <- regmatches(dat, regexpr(pattern, dat))
extract <- gsub('\n', "  ", extract)
strsplit(extract, "\\s{2,}")

From here the data can then be looped to create the table as desired. But as you can see in the link, the PDF is not only a table.