Extract hyperlink in PDF to Excel

Question

Hi I've been on the internet for almost 2 hours looking to get some answers to my question but no avail.

I have a folder that consists of almost 1000 PDF files. There is a hyperlink (email address) in each of the PDF. What I do next is I click on the mailto hyperlink and a new Outlook window opens, attach the PDF, and hit send. And this needs to be repeated for about 1000 times. The email addresses are different for every each of the PDFs.

So I was thinking if there is a way to extract hyperlink in PDF into excel so that I could have the hyperlinked email address say in Column A. I have the sending part figured out, except for this one now.

Thanks!

Answer 1

The fastest and least painful way to go about this would be to use a third-party tool which has the ability to parse email addresses from PDF files. A cursory Google search led me to these tools:

Email Address Collector - Demo version
https://www.outlook-apps.com/download/email-address-collector/

Atomic Email Logger http://www.atompark.com/file-email-extractor/

These programs have GUIs allowing you to select the PDFs from which you want to extract email addresses.

Keep in mind that you may have some more processing work afterwards. Consider that your PDFs might have more than one address (and you only want one of them). Manually writing a parser to extract email addresses from the PDFs yourself is not the way to go from what I can tell.

Once you have the list of email addresses you want in a text file, you can import that into Excel easily.