How to Convert PDF to TEXT 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 TEXT.

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:

Step by Step Guide

This is a step-by-step tutorial on how to convert PDF to text using Automation Anywhere and PDF.co plugin.

Contents

01
PDF.co API Endpoint
    02
    Bot Creation
      03
      URI Configuration
        04
        Headers Configuration
          05
          Request Input Configuration
            06
            Configure Rest API Output
              07
              Configure Message Box
                08
                Execute Bot and Review Output
                  09
                  Additional Service Configurations

                    PDF.co API Endpoint

                    PDF.co API Endpoint for converting PDF to TEXT. 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 requirement.

                    Configure API

                    Bot Creation

                    In Automation Anywhere cloud Control Room, create a new boat for extracting text from PDF. We’ll be using “Rest Web Service: Post Method” action to consume PDF.co “/pdf/convert/to/text” 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.

                    Bot Configuration

                    URI Configuration

                    Configure URI to “https://api.pdf.co/v1/pdf/convert/to/text” in “Rest Web Service: Post Method” action.

                    URI Configuration

                    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 keys can be obtained at https://pdf.co.

                    Headers Configuration

                    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-text/sample.pdf", "name": "result.txt" }
                    JSON Request

                    Configure Rest API Output

                    Create an output variable of type dictionary which will hold the response of 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” key from the output variable.

                    Configure Message Box

                    Execute Bot and Review Output

                    With this configuration completed, we’re now ready to execute the bot and see the output message box.

                    Output Message Box

                    Additional Service Configurations

                    PDF.co API endpoint properties can be configured as per our needs. For example, if we want output text to be included in response we can set the “inline” property to a “true” value.

                    { "url": "https://bytescout-com.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/files/demo-files/cloud-api/pdf-to-text/sample.pdf", "name": "result.txt", "inline": true }

                    Output with this changed input JSON will show output as shown in the following image.

                    Message From Bot

                    Now, you’ve learned how to convert PDF to text using Automation Anywhere and PDF.co plugin.