README.md

uic-course-description-parser

Simple Python script converting UIC official course description PDF to semi-structure file (TSV)

Setup Environment

It is recommended to create a new virtual enviroment for this project, you can use venv or conda.

After setup the environment, you need to install required packages specified in requirements.txt, this can be done with command pip install -r requirements.txt

After pip finished the installation, you have a enviroment ready to process the PDF.

Prepare the PDF file

Since we do not own the copyright of the file, we will not prepare a copy in this repositry. But you should able to obtain the file via AR's Website.

Use the Script

This script is not well polished, so parameters are all hard-coded. So before you actually press the button to start the parsing magic, you need to change these two variable:

• PDF_FILENAME at Line 7 of the extract.py file: This should point to the path where the PDF located.
• FILENAME_PREFIX at Line 6 of the extract.py file: This is the prefix for all output files.
  • The script should output three files, including
  • <FILENAME_PREFIX>-raw_lines.txt: The raw lines extracted from PDF file, use for code debug.
  • <FILENAME_PREFIX>-records.tsv: TSV file contains columns course_code, course_name, course_units, course_prerequisites
  • <FILENAME_PREFIX>-description.tsv: TSV file contains columns course_code, course_description

After you modified there two variable, you should able to start parsing with command python extract.py

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