MSheshera/PUResultConv

Command line tool that aids in converting the yearly college-wise engineering results distributed by the University of Pune, as pdf files, into csv files.

What this is:

This is a command line tool written in python that aids in converting the yearly college-wise engineering results distributed by the University of Pune (Savitribai Phule Pune University), as pdf files, into a csv file. This tool expects a text file rather than a pdf file.

The format of the result files varies with the curriculum (exam pattern as known to PU students). Accordingly, this tool fully supports 2008 Exam Pattern result files and partially supports 2012 Exam Pattern result files for now. In case of the 2008 Pattern files it can extract individual subject- wise marks and the total marks of all students whereas in the case of 2012 Pattern files it can only extract the total marks of all the students.

Description of the files:

prepInBldOut.py: Higher level code which calls the lower level data get functions, provides some control on nature of output generated and writes the output to disk.

extractData.py: Lower level code to extract data from the text file generated from the results pdf file.

./samples/inTest: Sample input text files. One file of each kind of exam pattern.

./samples/outCSV: Outputs for the sample inputs.

Usage Instructions:

1. Convert the pdf file to a text file while preserving the layout of the pdf file. I accomplish this by use of the pdftotext command line utility on Linux. Like so:

pdftotext -layout -nopgbrk input_file.pdf output_file.txt

This is also supposed to be available on Windows. I'm sure a Google search will help you to find out more.

2. Generate the csv file using this tool. Like so:

python prepInBuildOut.py input_text_file.txt

Or allow the script to be an executable:

chmod +x prepInBuildOut.py

And run it like so:

./prepInBuildOut.py input_text_file.txt

Ensure that both the python source files extractData.py and prepInBldOut.py are in your current directory while following the above instructions to run the script. The outputs will be written to a directory called outCSV in the current directory.

The output files are named as: College-ExamPattern-Year-Branch-ExamDate.csv

You can access the help instructions by passing -h command line argument to the script:

python prepInBuildOut.py -h

Note on version of Python:

The script requires Python 2.7 for it to function correctly. The code has been tested on Ubuntu 14.04.

Note on how the script works:

Uses regular expressions for all the extraction. Estimates the branch; finds the subjects and determines if they're elective or mandatory; finds details such as the exam pattern, college, branch of engineering, date of exam (month and year), year of engineering, total marks of all the students and subject- wise marks of all students; creates a csv file and writes it to disk.

Contact:

Write to me at mssheshera@yahoo.com with the subject-line "PU Result Analysis Suggestions" if you have suggestions or "PU Result Analysis Bugs" if you wish to report any errors in the code or "PU Result Analysis Misc" if its neither of the two previous cases.

License:

This work is released under the MIT License.