In the Sample project you can see how to parse a plain-text invoice and a GPS frame. I used Parsinator to connect 4 legacy client software to a documents API on an invoicing software by parsing pdf and plain text files to input XML files. I only needed to reuse the right skippers and parsers based on the structure of the new file. With this approach, I could parse new files without coding the whole thing every time I needed to support a new type of file. Voilà! That’s how I came up with Parsinator. Public class ParseFromLineNumberWithRegex : IParse Conclusion To ignore some text, I wrote skippers.Ī skipper to ignore the first lines of every page looks like this: So, I needed to “skip” the first or last lines in a page, all blank lines, everything between two line numbers or two regular expressions. For example, the legal notice at the bottom of the last page of an invoice. Second, there were some lines I could ignore. For example, the invoice number at the top-right corner of the first page. Also, I assumed that a file has some content on a given page and line. Imagine an invoice with lots of purchased items that requires a couple of pages to print. Skippersįirst, I assumed that a file has some content that spawns from one page to another. With parsers combinators, I could create small composable functions to extract or discard text at the page or line level. Their interactive API documentation explains the functionality of each of the endpoints. PDF Extractor SDK is easily accessible through the API in c sharp, python and javascript, and many more languages. I borrowed Parser combinators from Haskell and other functional languages. PDF Extractor SDK comes in two flavors, first, is the desktop-based which is an on-premise solution and the one is a web API based solution. My next concern was how to do the actual parsing. I abstracted this step to support any text, not only pdf files. One list per page and one string per line. No big deal after all!Īfter using iTextSharp, a pdf file was a list of lists of strings, List>. But, after Googling a bit, I found the iTextSharp pdf library and a StackOverflow answer to read a text-based pdf file. One of my concerns was how to read the text from the pdf file. A file with a different format would imply coding the whole thing again. To support files with any format, checking every line with regular expressions wasn’t a good solution. You will have to ship it by the end of the week.You will have to build something easy to grasp for your coworkers or your future self to maintain.You will receive not only pdf files but any plain-text file.Two clients won’t have the same file structure. You can receive pdf files with any structure.This was the challenge: parse a text-based pdf file into an XML file. The only input he could provide was a text-based pdf file. One of our clients couldn’t connect to our invoicing software. There I was, a normal day at the office with a new challenge. I wrote Parsinator to parse invoices into XML files to feed a documents API on an invoicing system. With Parsinator, you can create an XML file from a pdf file or an object from a printer spool file. Parsinator is a library to turn structured and unstructured text into a header-detail representation. My first thought was: “ how in the world am I going to read the text on the pdf file?” This is how I built Parsinator. One day your boss asks you to read a pdf file to extract relevant information to later process it in your main software. Microsoft Office, OpenOffice.Parsinator, a tale of a pdf parser #tutorial #showdev #csharp Several schema systems exist to aid in the definition of XML-based languages, while programmers have developed many application programming interfaces (APIs) to aid the processing of XML data.Īdobe Acrobat, Adobe InDesign, Adobe FrameMaker, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, Google Docs, LibreOffice, Microsoft Office, Foxit Reader, Ghostscript. XML is a textual data format with strong support via Unicode for different human languages. A structured storage system to bundle these elements and any associated content into a single file, with data compression where appropriate. A font-embedding/replacement system to allow fonts to travel with the documents. The PDF combines three technologies: A subset of the PostScript page description programming language, for generating the layout and graphics. The design goals of XML emphasize simplicity, generality, and usability across the Internet. In computing, Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language that defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. Each PDF file encapsulates a complete description of a fixed-layout flat document, including the text, fonts, graphics, and other information needed to display it. The Portable Document Format (PDF) is a file format used to present documents in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems. Application/pdf, application/x-pdf, application/x-bzpdf, application/x-gzpdf
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