I’m working on creating an automated workflow that triggers when a new PDF gets uploaded to a particular Google Drive folder. My goal is to extract specific information from these PDF files like names, contact details, qualifications, and work history, then automatically add this data to an Airtable database. I need help writing the extraction code since Zapier allows both Python and JavaScript. What’s the best approach to parse PDF content and pull out these specific field values? Any code examples or libraries you’d recommend for this type of document processing task?
for sure! docparser is really great for this type of stuff. It can snadily extract structured data from pdfs, and integrating it with zapier is super easy. gives you all the info you need without the hassle of coding.
I’ve been doing PDF extraction workflows for two years. PyPDF2 and pdfplumber both work great with Zapier for Python solutions. The biggest pain is that every PDF is structured differently - you’ll need regex pattern matching to find what you’re looking for. For names and contact info, I hunt for email patterns and phone number formats. Work history is way trickier since everyone formats it differently. If you’re dealing with scanned PDFs instead of text-based ones, throw Tesseract OCR into the mix. Just heads up - complex documents take forever to process, so bump up your Zapier timeout settings or you’ll get cut off mid-extraction.
Go with JavaScript and pdf-lib or PDF-parse - Zapier’s JavaScript environment handles PDFs way better than Python. I constantly hit memory issues with Python libraries on larger resume files. What saved me was converting PDFs to plain text first, then using string manipulation to pull what I needed. Regular expressions are your best friend here - something like /\b[A-Za-z0-9._%±]+@[A-Za-z0-9.-]+.[A-Z|a-z]{2,}\b/ works great for emails. For work history and structured stuff, I built templates based on common resume formats and matched against those patterns. Also, break your workflow into multiple Zapier steps instead of cramming everything into one code block - makes debugging so much easier when things go wrong.