Tesseract in iOS (Swift) - How to Separate Text and Numbers in UITextField? - ios

Question

I have a Swift-based application that currently implements the Tesseract OCR framework (similar to the form in this tutorial: http://www.raywenderlich.com/93276/implementing-tesseract-ocr-ios). So upon taking a picture and employing Tesseract, I obtain the following output in a UITextField object:
Subtotal 155.60
Tax 14.02
Total 169.82
So now I would like to separate the text from the numbers in the UITextField. I was considering using the "contain" function built into Swift on a matrix containing all values in price format ([0.01 0.02, etc.]) but this will only return a boolean as outlined in this post (How to have a textfield scan for all values in an array individually in swift?). Does anyone have any suggestions on how to do this? Cheers!
Tesseract Implementation
func performImageRecognition(image: UIImage)
// 0
// 1
let tesseract = G8Tesseract()
// 2
tesseract.language = "eng"
// 3
tesseract.engineMode = .TesseractCubeCombined
// 4
tesseract.pageSegmentationMode = .Auto
// 5
tesseract.maximumRecognitionTime = 60.0
// 6
tesseract.image = image.g8_blackAndWhite()
tesseract.recognize()
// 7
textView.text = tesseract.recognizedText
textView.editable = true

Answer 1

Sounds like you might want to look into using Regular Expressions
func seperate (text: String) -> (text: String?, value: String?) {
// You might want to do an extra check here to ensure the whole string is valid
// i.e., nothing in between the two parts of the string
let textMatch = text.rangeOfString("^([A-Z]|[a-z])+", options: .RegularExpressionSearch)
let priceMatch = text.rangeOfString("[0-9]*.[0-9]{2}$", options: .RegularExpressionSearch)
// You might want to adjust regex to handle price edge cases, such as 15 (rather than 15.00) etc
if let textMatch = textMatch, priceMatch = priceMatch {
let textValue = text.substringWithRange(textMatch)
let priceValue = text.substringWithRange(priceMatch)
return(textValue, priceValue)
} else {
return (nil, nil)
}
}
seperate("Subtotal 155.60") // -> Subtotal, 155.60