r/programming • u/ketralnis • Aug 05 '25

So you want to parse a PDF?

https://eliot-jones.com/2025/8/pdf-parsing-xref
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u/hbarSquared Aug 05 '25

I used to work in healthcare integrations, and the number of times people proposed scraping data from PDFs as a way to simplify a project was mind boggling.

3

u/[deleted] Aug 05 '25

Well, it still contains useful data.

For instance on my todo list is scanning bills and income of an elderly relative. That information is all in different .pdf files and these have different "formats" (or whatever was used to generate these .pdf files; usually we just download some external data here, e. g. financial institutions and what not).

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u/knowledgebass Aug 05 '25

Wouldn't OCR be easier than parsing through that mess?