Python

Most PDF extraction projects start with the document. You open a PDF, look at the text, write a regex, extract a value. Repeat for each field.

If you’re extracting data from PDFs in Python, you’ll encounter three libraries repeatedly: pdfplumber, PyMuPDF (imported as fitz), and PyPDF2. They overlap in capability but differ in what they’re optimised for.

Extracting tables from PDFs is one of the most common requirements in document automation and one of the most reliable ways to introduce subtle errors if you do it carelessly.