I need to be able to Parse the many items of a PDF financial data listing.

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The listing is a list of check register transactions. Each item of the listing contains the details of a single check such as date, type of transaction, check number, check amount, balance, etc. There will be many transactions in listing,

I have a new Apple 27" IMAC Computer. The financial data is from a Credit Union that I use as a bank. I get the data using the internet. Each item of he data is exported from the internet in PDF format.

I am able to download the data from the internet and identify it as a file. I hen want to use a PDF Parsing program to split each transaction into the several details of each transaction and enter them into a spreadsheet format such as Excel. Apple and others have computer programs that can let me use the data to understand my financial status.

Questions
1. Will Code Project membership help me accomplish this task?

2. I am quite sure that I will need to be able to work with someone to help me with this task. Will that be possible?

James L. Westcot, [contact details removed]

Posted 9-Jun-15 12:25pm

Member 11754090

Updated 9-Jun-15 12:47pm

Sascha Lefèvre

v2

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Sascha Lefèvre 9-Jun-15 19:04pm

Hi James! This is a public forum, you shouldn't post your contact details here. I removed it from your question to spare you unwelcome surprises.

You basically already have Codeproject membership. You probably used the quick-signup for asking a question -- you could edit your profile and provide a real name or pseudonym instead of that generic membership-number name and potentially other info about you -- but that's only for making a good impression and doesn't give you more benefits. So the membership itself doesn't help with accomplishing your task. Generally this whole site works that way that volunteers answer questions about specific programming problems. We don't provide code to order or offer some sort of project partnership. If you don't think you'll be able to accomplish this task yourself even with getting some pointers here, you would need to look somewhere else.

Good luck!
/Sascha

[no name] 9-Jun-15 19:39pm

Parsing pdfs is not trivial and unless you also control their creation potentially quite unreliable as this is not what they are meant for. Many institutions allow you to download data as a csv file which is all the work already done. You should check yours.

[no name] 9-Jun-15 20:05pm

1. Yes members will probably help you if you have a specific question about some code that you have written and are able to clearly articulate a problem description.
2. No one works for free. We do not do your work for you. If you want to collaborate, ask in that forum.

Stefan_Lang 11-Jun-15 6:34am

As pwasser already (under)stated, it's not trivial to parse a pdf file. Let's put it this way: if you don't even know where to start, you're likely not up to the task, even if much of the functionality can be covered with freely available and usable code and libraries (and I am not at all sure these exist!)

Consider a different approach:
1. check the source of your pdf files to see if these data are also available in a different format that is more accessible to digital processing
2. Check the source of your pdf files if it can deliver the data in a format that renders the processing obsolete
3. it might be easier to find and use an OCR program after rendering the pdf file as an image, than finding and incorporating a reasonably priced pdf parser for the same task. Judging by your description, there is very little data to scan, and you know very precisely where on that image you need to find it. That should make the OCR task trivial.

[no name] 15-Jun-15 17:36pm

Ask your bank / credit union to provide the data in a CSV or Excel format.

Another low-tech option is to open the PDF in Acrobat, copy select text to the clipboard, paste it into notepad, and save as CSV for viewing inside Excel.

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david21114 · Answer 1 · 2015-06-24T10:46:00

Solution 2

You should be able to export as a csv (comma separate or tab separated file) and open it up in Excel.

I would suggest also downloading and installing OpenOffice it's hosted on the Apache projects website.

Try using the OpenOffice Calc program too.

Sometimes it works better than Excel for things like this and sometimes not.

Kind regards,

Posted 24-Jun-15 10:46am

david21114

Comments

[no name] 24-Jun-15 22:44pm

What are you talking about exporting?