receipt-scanner 0.3.2
Write applications to charge money to your friends after you paid the whole bill by easily parsing the receipt 💸
License: MIT
Requires Python: >=3.10,<4.0

<h1 align="center">Receipt Scanner</h1>

<p align="center">
    <em>
        Write applications to charge money to your friends after you paid the whole bill by easily parsing the receipt 💸
    </em>
</p>

<p align="center">
<a href="https://pypi.org/project/receipt-scanner" target="_blank">
    <img src="https://img.shields.io/pypi/v/receipt-scanner?label=version&logo=python&logoColor=%23fff&color=306998" alt="PyPI - Version">
</a>
<a href="https://github.com/daleal/receipt-scanner/actions?query=workflow%3Alinters" target="_blank">
    <img src="https://img.shields.io/github/workflow/status/daleal/receipt-scanner/linters?label=linters&logo=github" alt="Linters">
</a>
</p>

## Why would I use Receipt Scanner

We've all been there: the dinner ended and the bill arrived at the table. Everyone is looking at you to pay for the bill. "_I will pay you back immediately_", they say. "_Just send a picture of the receipt I will transfer you the money_". **Idiots**. We all know most of them will have forgotten about the damn receipt picture as soon as they get into their cars. **Now you can take matters into your own hands**. Using this library, you can write an application that parses and classifies items from the receipt, and then charges money to your friends _automagically_. No more waiting for them to calculate the amount they owe you "_as soon as they have a minute_".

## Installation

Install using pip!

```sh
pip install receipt-scanner
```

## Usage

### As a package

After installation, you can import the `scan` method from the library. Just pass the image location (it can be a local path or a URL), an optional regular expression to filter the parsed text and the optional `debug` parameter:

```py
import re
from receipt_scanner import scan

expression = re.compile("([0-9]+\.[0-9]+)")
scanned_text_lines = scan(
    "path/to/some/image.jpg",
    regular_expression=expression,
    debug=True,
)
```

The `scan` method returns a list of strings for each text line that the regular expression matched. If no regular expression gets passed, every parsed text line will be returned.

### As a CLI

You can also use `receipt-scanner` as a CLI! Once installed, the `scanner` command will be available. Here is a sample usage:

```sh
scanner --image path/to/some/image.jpg --expression "([0-9]+\.[0-9]+)" --debug
```

### Specifying allowed characters

By default, the library will use for the following characters:

```py
DEFAULT_ALLOWED_CHARACTERS = (
    "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNÑOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnñopqrstuvwxyz1234567890\ "
)
```

Notice that the last "\ " represents the space character.

You can pass a set of allowed characters to the engine, either by using the `--characters` flag when using the CLI or by passing the `allowed_characters` attribute to the `scan` method of the library.

### Debugging

The `debug` flag will show logs of every step, and will freeze each image manipulation step to show the result of said manipulation. This can be useful to understand why the `scan` command might be returning an empty list, for example (you might find that the image has poor contrast and that the contour of the receipt is not being correctly mapped).

## Developing

### Requirements

- [Poetry](https://python-poetry.org)
- [Tesseract](https://tesseract-ocr.github.io/tessdoc/Installation.html)
- [Teseract Spanish](https://parzibyte.me/blog/2019/05/18/instalar-tesseract-ocr-idioma-espanol-ubuntu)

### Steps

Clone the repository:

```sh
git clone https://github.com/daleal/receipt-scanner.git

cd receipt-scanner
```

Then, recreate the environment:

```sh
make build-env
```

Once the package is installed for development (`poetry install`), you can use the CLI from the virtualenv.

## Aknowledgements

Most of the code from this project was adapted from StackOverflow answers to questions about contour-finding, denoising and stuff like that. I also used code from several guides from the internet for utilities such as transforming a contour to a rect. Without those answers, most of this library would have been impossible for me to write. Thanks for the awesome information! 💖