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Task

You want to get, save, or show the contents of elements that are represented as HTML, such as tables that are embedded in a PDF document.

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Approach

Extract the contents of an element’s text_as_html JSON object, which is nested inside of its parent metadata object.

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To run this example

You will need a document that is one of the document types that can output the text_as_html JSON object. For the list of applicable document types, see the entries in the table at the beginning of Partitioning where “Table Support” is “Yes.”

This example uses a PDF file with an embedded table.

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Code

For the Unstructured Ingest Python library, you can use the standard Python json.load function to load into a Python dictionary the contents of a JSON file that the Ingest Python library outputs after the processing is complete.

Python
import json, os, webbrowser

def get_tables_as_html(
        input_json_file_path: str,
        output_html_dir_path: str
    ):
    with open(input_json_file_path, 'r') as file:
        file_elements = json.load(file)

    # Provide some minimal CSS for better table readability.
    table_css = "<head><style>table, th, td { border: 1px solid; }</style></head>"

    for element in file_elements:
        if "text_as_html" in element["metadata"]:
            # Surround the element's HTML with basic <html> and <body> tags, and add the minimal CSS.
            html_string = f"<!DOCTYPE html><html>{table_css}<body>{element["metadata"]["text_as_html"]}</body></html>"

            # Save the element's HTML to a local file.
            save_path = f"{output_html_dir_path}/{element["element_id"]}.html"
            file = open(save_path, 'w')
            file.write(html_string)
            file.close()

            # View the locally saved file in the local default web browser.
            webbrowser.open_new(f"file:///{os.getcwd()}/{save_path}")

if __name__ == "__main__":
    # Source: https://github.com/Unstructured-IO/unstructured-ingest/blob/main/example-docs/pdf/embedded-images-tables.pdf

    # Specify where to get the local file, relative to this .py file, and
    # where to store the retrieved HTML, relative to this .py file.
    get_tables_as_html(
        input_json_file_path="local-ingest-output/embedded-images-tables.json",
        output_html_dir_path="local-ingest-output/html/"
    )