Python Tabula Library - Output File Is Empty

Question

I am using the Tabula module in Python. I am trying to output text from a PDF.

I am using this code:

pdf_read = tabula.read_pdf(
    input_path = "Test File.pdf",
    pages = start_page_number,
    guess=False,
    area=(81.735,18.55,391.285,273.61),
    relative_area = False,
    format="TSV",
    output_path="testing_area.tsv"
    )

When I go to run my code, it says "The output file is empty."

Any idea why this could be?

Edit: If I remove everything except the input_path and pages, my data is getting read into pdf_read correctly, it just does not output into an external file.

Something is wrong with this option...hmm...

Edit #2: I figured out why the area part was not working and now it is, but I still can't get this to output a file for some reason.

Edit #3: I tried looking at this: How to convert PDF to CSV with tabula-py?

But I keep getting an error message: "build_options() got an unexpected keyword argument 'spreadsheet'

Edit #4: I'm using the latest version of tabula.py, which doesn't have the spreadsheet option.

Still can't output a file with data though.

Answer 1

I don't know why that wasn't working above, so the output of pdf_read is a list.

I converted the list into a dataframe and then output the dataframe using to_csv.

Code is below:

import pandas as pd

df = pd.DataFrame(pdf_read,columns=["column_a"])

output_df = df.to_csv(

    "alternative_attempt_1.txt",
    header=True,
    index=True,
    sep='\t',
    mode='w',
    encoding="cp1252"

    )