How do I download Financial data from companies onto matlab?

I am trying to do some research on companies financial statements but all of their income statements are on pdf format. Is there a way of transferring this data into a form that I can do analysis on?

Answer 1

[Guillaume]

Matlab does not have any built-in tools to extract data from generic pdf. I would think that it is because generically there's no way to extract structured data from pdf. Even extracting text may not be a simple task due to the way the pdf format works. There are probably some commercial tools available to extract the content from pdf. I recall a question fairly recently on this forum where the person said they used such a tool. No mention of the name though.

Depending on how the pdf was created, the content could be more or less consecutive text (easier to extract), an image of the text (which would require OCR, so significantly harder), or a complete mess where each character is positioned individually by the pdf code (good luck extracting that). The pdf format is designed to display text, not to transmit structured data to programs.