How-to guides/Text Extraction

Extract table data from PDFs in Rust

Detect and extract structured table data from PDF pages. Get rows and cells as Rust values without writing custom parsing logic.

rust
use pdfluent::PdfDocument;

fn main() -> Result<(), Box<dyn std::error::Error>> {
    let doc = PdfDocument::open("report.pdf")?;
    let page = doc.page(0)?;

    for table in page.extract_tables()? {
        for row in &table.rows {
            let cells: Vec<&str> = row.iter()
                .map(|c| c.text.as_str())
                .collect();
            println!("{}", cells.join(" | "));
        }
    }
    Ok(())
}
Install:cargo add pdfluentDownload SDK →

Step by step

1

Open the PDF and access the page

Table extraction works on a per-page basis. Open the document and select the page that contains the table.

rust
use pdfluent::PdfDocument;

let doc = PdfDocument::open("financial_report.pdf")?;
let page = doc.page(1)?; // 0-indexed, so this is page 2
2

Extract all tables from a page

extract_tables() returns a Vec<Table>. Each Table has a rows field: a Vec<Vec<TableCell>>. Cells span columns if they have a colspan greater than 1.

rust
let tables = page.extract_tables()?;
println!("Found {} table(s) on this page", tables.len());
3

Iterate rows and cells

Each TableCell contains the text content and the column span. Iterate rows and cells to process the data.

rust
for (ti, table) in tables.iter().enumerate() {
    println!("Table {}: {} rows", ti + 1, table.rows.len());
    for row in &table.rows {
        for cell in row {
            print!("[{}] ", cell.text.trim());
        }
        println!();
    }
}
4

Export a table to CSV

Write a simple CSV from the extracted rows. Use the csv crate for proper quoting.

rust
use std::io::Write;

let mut out = std::fs::File::create("table.csv")?;
for row in &tables[0].rows {
    let line = row.iter()
        .map(|c| format!(""{}"", c.text.replace('"', """")))
        .collect::<Vec<_>>()
        .join(",");
    writeln!(out, "{}", line)?;
}
5

Tune table detection

Use TableExtractionOptions to adjust the line-merge tolerance and minimum cell size, which helps with tables that have thin or invisible borders.

rust
use pdfluent::TableExtractionOptions;

let opts = TableExtractionOptions::default()
    .line_tolerance(2.0)
    .min_cell_width(20.0);

let tables = page.extract_tables_with_options(&opts)?;

Notes and tips

  • Table detection uses both ruling lines and whitespace-gap analysis. Documents with well-defined borders produce the most accurate results.
  • Merged cells (rowspan/colspan) are detected and reported in the TableCell.colspan and TableCell.rowspan fields.
  • For pages with multiple tables, each Table value includes its bounding box so you can identify which table on the page it corresponds to.

Why PDFluent for this

Pure Rust

No JVM, no runtime, no DLL dependencies. Ships as a single native binary or WASM module.

Memory safe

Rust's ownership model prevents buffer overflows and use-after-free. No segfaults in PDF parsing.

Runs anywhere

Same code runs server-side, in Docker, on AWS Lambda, on Cloudflare Workers, or in the browser via WASM.

Frequently asked questions

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