Command-Line Interface

Camelot comes with a command-line interface.

You can print the help for the interface by typing camelot --help in your favorite terminal program, as shown below. Furthermore, you can print the help for each command by typing camelot <command> --help. Try it out!

Running without installing (uvx)

If you only want to use the CLI ad-hoc, uvx lets you run it without installing Camelot into the current environment:

$ uvx camelot-py lattice --output tables.csv document.pdf

The camelot-py console script is an alias for camelot matching the PyPI package name, so the older uvx --from camelot-py camelot … invocation also still works.

Format inference

--format is optional — when omitted, Camelot infers the format from the --output path’s extension. Supported extensions:

So this works:

$ camelot-py lattice --output tables.xlsx document.pdf
# equivalent to: camelot-py lattice --format excel --output tables.xlsx document.pdf

Output is a template

--output is treated as a template — each detected table is written to <output_stem>-page-<P>-table-<T>.<ext>. So --output report.csv on a document with 2 tables on page 1 and 1 table on page 3 produces report-page-1-table-1.csv, report-page-1-table-2.csv, report-page-3-table-1.csv.

camelot

Camelot: PDF Table Extraction for Humans.

Usage

camelot [OPTIONS] COMMAND [ARGS]...

Options

--version

Show the version and exit.

Commands

hybrid

Combines the strengths of both the Network…

lattice

Use lines between text to parse the table.

network

Use text alignments to parse the table.

stream

Use spaces between text to parse the table.