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Subject:RE: Tools: PDF to SQL From:Matthew Horn <mhorn -at- macromedia -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Fri, 23 Aug 2002 10:42:30 -0400
This topic has one of those Subject lines that makes me go, "Wha?".
1. Export the PDF as an RTF document
2. Open RTF in favorite word processor (Word).
3. Convert to simple text format (TXT).
4. Buy a book on Perl. Laura LeMay's book will get you up to speed fast. And I believe she is a member of this list.
5. Write script that uses Perl's text-manipulation functions to extract data from text file.
6. Extend this script or write another script that converts the extracted data into SQL statements.
7. Insert SQL into database.
I did this once, but instead of SQL statements, I had to put the data into Visual Basic toData functions. Don't ask.
Time? Coupla hours.
Easy? Fairly, but depends on the data.
Fun? Absolutely.
Matthew Horn
Sr. Technical Writer
< m a c r o m e d i a >
-----Original Message-----
From: Gregory Sweet [mailto:Gsweet -at- cdphp -dot- com]
Sent: Friday, August 23, 2002 9:52 AM
To: TECHWR-L
Subject: Tools: PDF to SQL
Hello all,
I've had a request to come up with some method of converting data stored in PDFs to data suitable to be stored in a SqlServer DB. I checked out PDFzone and came up with a product called BCLJade and another called Redwing. Redwing seems to be out because it's not compatible with Acrobat 5 and BCLjade seems very limited (writing each line break as a new record).
Does anyone have any insight into this type of task and the tools that can be used to accomplish it?
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