Please advice: extracting text from pdf and writing to csv? (new to programming)

1

I’m new to programming. They say the best way to learn is to get your hands dirty making a tool you need.
So, I need a tool to extract text from a pdf (a row from a table) and convert that to a csv that can be imported in Google Calendar.
I’ve been looking around and I could for example use pdfplumber in Python. But I’m not sure if that’s the best language/tool for the job? What would you have me look into?

The scenario: I’m a nurse. Every month we get a pdf that has our shifts in it. I would like to extract the row that has my shifts and make a properly formatted csv that I can import into Google Calendar, so I don’t have to use copy/paste in the calendar anymore. Eventually it would be nice if my colleagues could do the same, so maybe a web based solution would be better than a standalone Python program? Upload pdf, input name, download csv?

2

Tabula-Py
If the pdf is only contains the tables (rows and columns) then you can convert it into dataframes and then do the needful manipulation on data.

After that you can again convert the dataframe into CSV.

For importing to google drive you might look into the Google Calendar ApI

Tell me if this helps.

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One of the examples in the pdfplumber documentation mentions DataFrame.
I’ve looked at the Google Calendar API and the Google developer console, but my understanding at this point is that my application would need to be approved to use OAuth for having write access to a calendar. I agree that it would eventually be easier to do it this way, just put in your name and the app selects the shifts and puts them in the correct calendar. I feel this is too much out of my depth for the moment, I’d be happy with importing a csv. This leaves the logging in/OAuth part for the (potentially someone other than me) user.

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Yes you are right , once you are done with the csv file, you should go with the import method of google calendar.
After that you can incrementally add the further automation of Calendar API.

(As a search about pdf in pythons: Their are mainly 2-3 libraries present which are PyPDF2 , PDFPlumber, Tabula-Py)
PDFPlumber and Tabula-Py both are having good docs and code examples .
Choose any of’em.
Best Luck!

(P.S. I like your project idea!)