Running a JavaScript command from MATLAB to fetch a PDF file

Question

I\'m currently writing some MATLAB code to interact with my company\'s internal reports database. So far I can access the HTML abstract page using code which looks like this

Answer 1

Once you have gotten the correct URL (a la the answer from pjp), your next problem is to "get the contents of the PDF file into a MATLAB variable". Whether or not this is possible may depend on what you mean by "contents"...

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If you want to get the raw data in the PDF file, I don't think there is a way currently to do this in MATLAB. The URLREAD function was the first thing I thought of to read content from a URL into a string, but it has this note in the documentation:

s = urlread('url') reads the content at a URL into the string s. If the server returns binary data, s will be unreadable.

Indeed, if you try to read a PDF as in the following example, s contains some text intermingled with mostly garbage:

s = urlread('http://samplepdf.com/sample.pdf');

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If you want to get the text from the PDF file, you have some options. First, you can use URLWRITE to save the contents of the URL to a file:

urlwrite('http://samplepdf.com/sample.pdf','temp.pdf');

Then you should be able to use one of two submissions on The MathWorks File Exchange to extract the text from the PDF:

• Extract text from a PDF document by Dimitri Shvorob
• PDF Reader by Tom Gaudette

If you simply want to view the PDF, you can just open it in Adobe Acrobat with the OPEN function:

open('temp.pdf');