tabula-py

To ignore useless areas and focus on a specific part of the PDF, use the area and spreadsheet options.

Calculating Area Coordinates: When using coordinates from tools like macOS Preview, calculate the area tuple as follows:

• y1 = top
• x1 = left
• y2 = top + height
• x2 = left + width

Note: For many PDFs, the spreadsheet=True option is required for the area to work properly.

tabula.read_pdf('./table.pdf', spreadsheet=True, area=(337.29, 226.49, 472.85, 384.91))

You can pass configuration flags to the JVM using the java_options argument.

• Prevent focus stealing on macOS: Use java_options=["-Djava.awt.headless=true"].
• Fix encoding issues on Windows: If you see ? characters in UTF-8 PDFs, run chcp 65001 in your terminal and pass java_options="-Dfile.encoding=UTF8" to read_pdf.

Important: Because jpype is used, java_options cannot be changed once the JVM has started. If you need to change these options, you must restart the Python process.

Install tabula-py using pip. To enable faster execution using jpype, install the jpype extra.

Requirements:

• Java: Java 8 or higher must be installed on your environment.
• Python: Python 3.9 or higher.

Note: It is recommended to use pip rather than conda-forge to ensure you are using the latest version.

To avoid ParserError: Error tokenizing data. C error (which occurs when pandas tries to merge tables with different column counts) and to extract all tables in a file, set multiple_tables=True. This will return a list of DataFrames instead of a single DataFrame.

df = read_pdf(file_path, multiple_tables=True)

If you want to use a specific version of the tabula-java JAR file, set the TABULA_JAR environment variable.

export TABULA_JAR=".../tabula-x.y.z-jar-with-dependencies.jar"

To leverage faster execution using jpype, install the package with the jpype extra.

pip install tabula-py[jpype]

tabula-py requires a Java environment to function. Before installing, ensure Java is available on your machine by running java -version.

Install the package using pip. It is recommended to use {sys.executable} -m pip install tabula-py to ensure it is installed in the correct Python environment.

After installation, you can verify your environment (Python version, Java version, and OS) using tabula.environment_info().

# Check Java
!java -version

# Install tabula-py
!pip install -q tabula-py

# Verify environment
import tabula
tabula.environment_info()

If you encounter issues where tabula-py does not work, ensure Java is installed and the java command is available in your terminal. You can verify if tabula-py can access Java from your Python process using tabula.environment_info().

Namespace Conflict: If you have a package named tabula installed, it will conflict with tabula-py. To fix this, uninstall tabula and install tabula-py instead.

pip uninstall tabula
pip install tabula-py

If tabula.read_pdf() raises a FileNotFoundError and running java in your command line returns 'java' is not recognized as an internal or external command, you must add the Java bin directory to your system PATH.

1. Find your Java installation folder (e.g., C:\Program Files\Java\jdk... or jre...).
2. Open Control Panel -> System and Security -> System -> Advanced System Settings -> Environment Variables.
3. Select PATH from the list and click Edit.
4. Add the path to the bin folder (e.g., C:\Program Files\Java\jre1.8.0_144\bin).
5. Verify by running java in a new command line window; it should print a list of options.