How to scrape a particular text from PDF using Selenium with VBA

Question

I am doing a automation project, where it starts with opening browser, visiting a URL, logging to it, clicking on few links and finally click a link which opens a PDF file in browser itself. Now I want to get a line from the PDF to the Excel (like string).

I have used the below code, which was the courtesy of the author from GitHub. With the code I am only able to scrape the first line of the PDF. The PDF I use is dynamic and some times the info I require is at the 5th line and sometimes it is at the 25th line and so on...

Hope I have explained it, pardon me for any errors.

Private Sub Handle_PDF_Chrome()
Dim driver As New ChromeDriver
driver.Get "http://static.mozilla.com/moco/en-US/pdf/mozilla_privacypolicy.pdf"

' Return the first line using the pugin API (asynchronous).
Const JS_READ_PDF_FIRST_LINE_CHROME As String = _
"addEventListener('message',function(e){" & _
" if(e.data.type=='getSelectedTextReply'){" & _
"  var txt=e.data.selectedText;" & _
"  callback(txt && txt.match(/^.+$/m)[0]);" & _
" }" & _
"});" & _
"plugin.postMessage({type:'initialize'},'*');" & _
"plugin.postMessage({type:'selectAll'},'*');" & _
"plugin.postMessage({type:'getSelectedText'},'*');"

' Assert the first line
Dim firstline
firstline = driver.ExecuteAsyncScript(JS_READ_PDF_FIRST_LINE_CHROME)
Assert.Equals "Websites Privacy Policy", firstline

driver.Quit
End Sub

QHarr · Accepted Answer · 2019-06-18 12:38:18Z

2

Assuming your code does function you need to change the regex and index.

The regex becomes

[^\r\n]+

to retrieve all lines (ignoring empty lines). You then index with 4 to get line 5.

Regex explanation:

addEventListener('message',function(e){if(e.data.type=='getSelectedTextReply'){var txt=e.data.selectedText;
callback(txt && txt.match(/[^\r\n]+/g)[4]);}});
plugin.postMessage({type:'initialize'},'*');
plugin.postMessage({type:'selectAll'},'*');
plugin.postMessage({type:'getSelectedText'},'*');

edited Jun 18, 2019 at 12:38

answered Jun 18, 2019 at 12:23

QHarr

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1 Comment

David Over a year ago

is it possible to copy all the text and paste it in the excel. Also can we copy multiple lines like 5th and 7th or 5th to 7th.

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