By Jprawson-1 on

Hello all -

I have a large amount of data in thousands of PDF files that I would like to segment into fields and then upload to a new drupal installation. Is there an easy way to accomplish this?

Imagine a catalog of products with all of the pertinent information.... Images, price, manufacturer, location, etc etc etc. The data needs to be searchable based upon every field.

Thanks in advance for any assistance.

Comments

Jprawson-1’s picture

Jprawson-1 commented

It appears that the feed import module may do this.... Any thoughts on the difficulty level?

WorldFallz’s picture

WorldFallz commented

Feeds seems a little complex at first, but once you go through setting it up once it's actually quite simple. And there's video tutorials to help with that first time. You'll want to segment the import in order to avoid timeouts and such though.

imo your bigger issue is going to be parsing the info out of the pdfs and getting it into a format feeds supports (i'm not aware of a feeds pdf parser).

Another option might be migrate-- but that's probably going to require some custom coding (not sure of the status of the 2.x ui these days).

andyguzman’s picture

andyguzman commented

It looks like there are some tools (outside of Drupal - just did a quick PDF to CSV Google search) that would be able to convert into a format that Feeds could deal with. It's a stretch but worth looking into:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxAzlN4om5E

mjcarter’s picture

mjcarter commented

Yes this is what I have done in the past with PDFs. I'm sure there's some kind of proprietary software that does the same thing in batches if you really have a huge amount of data, but there are plenty of PDF converters online for single docs. The main thing is to tell your clients that PDF is not a suitable format to provide data. I always include a excessively large surcharge with freelance work for working with PDF data.

Surprising the number of times they have the exact same thing already in Word/Excel/other format hidden away on their HD and the hefty surcharge motivates them to suddenly 'discover' it.