I have just written my own parser. Took some work when my bank switched from txt to PDF.

Then I match keywords in the strings to categorize the expenses. These days, this would be called AI :)

Edit: I use pdftotext, which has a mode that keeps the spatial structure of tables. Works for my bank.

There are no general solutions, unfortunately. Every PDF-generating system will do things differently, so parsing them must be custom for each type. Generated PDFs are usually very systematic, though, and PDF commands are text (compressed). You can uncompress with PDFTK:

  pdftk input.pdf output output.pdf uncompress

Then try grepping or using whatever tools you like (there will be binary parts of the file still, like embedded fonts and bitmaps).

The poor person’s solution would be mint.com... though the security model there is dubious.