[GNC] Third party OFX/CVS providers

[Tom Browder]

On Sat, Aug 6, 2022 at 21:25 Chris Good <goodchris96 at gmail.com> wrote:
> From: Tom Browder <tom.browder at gmail.com>
> Sent: Sunday, 7 August 2022 12:37 AM
> To: Chris Good <goodchris96 at gmail.com>
> Cc: gnucash-user at gnucash.org
> Subject: Re: [GNC] Third party OFX/CVS providers
>
>
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> On Sat, Aug 6, 2022 at 08:51 Chris Good <goodchris96 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> ..,
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> Can you copy the text out of the pdf statement?
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> Getting "organized" text programmatically out of PDF is a giant pain. My current approach is almost completely programmatic. BTW, Raku is the "sister" language of Perl, and it is a "scripting" language.
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> Raku can also use Perl modules so I can use Finance::Quote with it if need be. But, until I can get the bank data working, I won't be needing it.
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> Thanks, Chris.
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> -Tom
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> Hi Tom,
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> I was actually suggesting you just highlight the transactions in the pdf statement and copy/paste them into a
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> spreadsheet or text file before using a scripting language to reformat them but if you can programmatically
> extract the text that would be better long term.

But I did see Peter West's warning about checking results
carefully--it's not always the expected result. Although I hope the
products from the same source are consistent enough to make it
reasonably fool proof. (See my comments below.)

> I notice with my PDF statement that (free) Adobe Acrobat DC no longer allows me to select text (as they want me to pay for a fancy tool - BOO) but if you send the pdf to Edge or Chrome you can select just the transaction text.

Yes, I now see my "PDF COmplete" on Windows can do that--I never
thought of doing that until now.

> Thanks for the info re Raku.

You're welcome! I'm always happy for programmers to learn about Raku

> Finance::Quote is just for getting stock prices from websites (usually) so not useful for this task.

Right, but good to know for later.

> Are you sure you cannot export transactions from your bank? All mine do although sometimes it is hard to find.

Yes, and I agree it's sometimes hard to find. Yesterday I did find one
bank (the bank I'm leaving) does have two choices of download for the
credit card: CSV and OFX. That is very helpful for working on a
transformation algorithm. I did look at the PDF to text transformation
on one of the new bank's statements (definitely nothing but PDFs) and
it looks surprisingly usable, so that's exciting.

I was too hasty in my outright condemnation of PDF to text because I
had worked on a project with a PDF expert to generate PDF as a native
file and saw how easy it is to get things out of place. I usually
create beautiful, and accurate, PDFs by writing the PostScript code
and relying on Ghostscript's ps2pdf converter. Thus going backwards in
the workflow is a little different for my longtime mindset.

Best regards,

-Tom