How to Convert PDF to CSV Using Automation Anywhere and PDF.co
About Automation Anywhere
Automation Anywhere is a technology company headquartered in San Jose, California, USA. It is a provider of an end-to-end Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) platform for automating any business process. They offer Discovery Bot for fast-track automation, IQ Bot for transforming unstructured and hidden data with AI that can learn on its own, Bot Insight for real-time analytics, and a Bot Store to get pre-built automation solutions.
We prepared this step by step tutorial with screenshots on how to make a Bot using PDF.co to convert PDF to CSV.
In this tutorial, we assume that you have already had a Community or Enterprise version of Automation anywhere with chrome extension as well as client agent already installed. We also assume that you have basic knowledge of how to create a simple bot and have it executed on your machine.
Useful Resources:
- Automation Anywhere - https://automationanywhere.com
- PDF.co - https://pdf.co
- PDF.co API Documentations - https://developer.pdf.co
- PDF.co Postman Collection - https://apidocs.pdf.co/PDF.co%20API%20v.1.00.postman_collection.json
- PDF Multitool - https://bytescout.com/products/pdfmultitool/index.html
Step by Step Guide
This is a step-by-step tutorial on how to convert PDF to CSV using Automation Anywhere and PDF.co plugin.
PDF.co API Endpoint
PDF.co API Endpoint for converting PDF to CSV. We’ll have PDF.co method documentation handy either by Postman or online documentation at https://developer.pdf.co, so that we can configure API as per our need.
Bot Creation
In Automation Anywhere cloud Control Room, create a new boat for extracting CSV data from PDF. We’ll be using “Rest Web Service: Post Method” action to consume PDF.co “/pdf/convert/to/csv” API endpoint. We’ll also have the “Message Box” action attached to the output of the API call. The final bot structure will be as follows.
URI Configuration
Configure URI to “https://api.pdf.co/v1/pdf/convert/to/text” in “Rest Web Service: Post Method” action.
Headers Configuration
Configure the Header key with the name “x-api-key” with the API key for PDF.co. This API key is essential for consuming pdf.co APIs. API key can be obtained at https://pdf.co.
Request Input Configuration
Configure input data to the REST web API call. Here, we’ve configured very basic JSON service request data as follows.
{"url": "https://bytescout-com.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/files/demo-files/cloud-api/pdf-to-csv/sample.pdf", "name": "result.csv"}
Configure REST API Output
Generate an output variable of type dictionary that will be holding the response of this API call.
Configure Message Box
Drag and Drop the “Message box” action and attach it after the “REST Web Service: Post Method” action. Here, we’ll configure the “message to display” property with the “Body” property of the output variable.
Execute Bot and Review Output
With this configuration completed, we’re now ready to execute the bot and see the output message box. Before review the bot output message, let’s review the following input PDF used.
This is the final output message box of this bot.
If open the output URL, we’ll have CSV as following.
Additional Service Configurations
So far we’ve seen a basic version of PDF to CSV conversation. If we want to have a particular portion of PDF to be converted to CSV we can achieve this by configuring rect property of input request as following.
{"url": "https://bytescout-com.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/files/demo-files/cloud-api/pdf-to-csv/sample.pdf", "name": "result.csv", "rect": "25.5, 302.3, 546.8, 151.5"}By using Free PDF Multitool provided by ByteScout, we can get the selected region from the input PDF as follows.
And, this is how to output CSV looks like after we execute bot with the modified request.
Now, you’ve learned how to convert PDF to CSV using Automation Anywhere and PDF.co plugin.