Applescript or workflow to extract text from PDF and rename PDF with the results

.... but the rename functions doesn't let me use variables.

It should. This test worked for me:

That is strange. Do you get an error message?

What does it show in the last Action when you click: [Results]

Phillip Briggs wrote:

It says more than one item was passed?

but I'm just trying to select the PDF which was previously named "Working"

Click [Results] in the Get Specifies Finder Items Workclow to see what was passed

Tony and Phillip,

Perhaps a regular expression grouping within BBedit will return just the text string you want and not the whole line.

The codes I'm looking to extract all begin with HB- and are this format: HB-.._......

Sample text here:

Selected Cleaning*

*See individual labels for items included

in this offer. EPU5 Offer valid from 09/03/14 to 27/04/14 HB-PC_123456



As VikingOSX suggested, use regular expressions. I don't use BBedit, so you'll need to look at the documentation, but the expression in grep is:

"HB-.*[0-9]"

This assumes that the last character is a number.

If you want from HB- to the last char use:

"HB-.*$"

If you're not familiar with BBEdit reg-ex (I'm not), you can:

Add Run Shell Script (and Pass Input [as arguments] after Set Value of Variable with:

echo "$1" | grep -o "HB-.*$"

Then add Set Value of Variable again:

I guess you can put this Run Shell Script before your Set Value of Varialble (no need to set variable again)

Hello

You may also try the following applescript script, which is a wrapper of rubycocoa script. It will ask you choose source pdf files and destination directory. Then it will scan text of each page of pdf files for the predefined pattern and save the page as new pdf file with the name as extracted by the pattern in the destination directory. Those pages which do not contain string matching the pattern are ignored. (Ignored pages, if any, are reported in the result of script.)

Currently the regex pattern is set to:

/HB-.._[0-9]{6}/

which means HB- followed by two characters and _ and 6 digits.

Minimally tested under 10.6.8.

Hope this may help,

H

_main()
on _main()
    script o
        property aa : choose file with prompt ("Choose pdf files.") of type {"com.adobe.pdf"} ¬
            default location (path to desktop) with multiple selections allowed
        
        set my aa's beginning to choose folder with prompt ("Choose destination folder.") ¬
            default location (path to desktop)
        
        set args to ""
        repeat with a in my aa
            set args to args & a's POSIX path's quoted form & space
        end repeat
        
        considering numeric strings
            if (system info)'s system version < "10.9" then
                set ruby to "/usr/bin/ruby"
            else
                set ruby to "/System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/bin/ruby"
            end if
        end considering
        
        do shell script ruby & " <<'EOF' - " & args & "
require 'osx/cocoa'
include OSX
require_framework 'PDFKit'

outdir = ARGV.shift.chomp('/')

ARGV.select {|f| f =~ /\\.pdf$/i }.each do |f|
    url = NSURL.fileURLWithPath(f)
    doc = PDFDocument.alloc.initWithURL(url)
    path = doc.documentURL.path
    pcnt = doc.pageCount
    
    (0 .. (pcnt - 1)).each do |i|
        page = doc.pageAtIndex(i)
        page.string.to_s =~ /HB-.._[0-9]{6}/
        name = $&
        unless name
            puts \"no matching string in page #{i + 1} of #{path}\"
            next # ignore this page
        end
        doc1 = PDFDocument.alloc.initWithData(page.dataRepresentation) # doc for this page
        unless doc1.writeToFile(\"#{outdir}/#{name}.pdf\")
            puts \"failed to save page #{i + 1} of #{path}\"
        end
    end
end
EOF"
    end script
    tell o to run
end _main