Searching with wildcards

[bswiss56 8]

Evernote has this super searching syntax!

I would like to extract some specific data extraction out of e.g. my stored receipts in Evernote (PDF).

Does any one out there have/knows a solution that would work together with super Evernote...?

Thx!
 

[agsteele 3,060]

You should have to tell us a bit more about the note names. You can search for all your PDFs but that would find notes that were not receipts but still contained a PDF.

If all your relevant notes contained the word receipt then your search would be for PDFs and receipt. My guess is that some receipts might include the word invoice rather than receipt. So your search would need to be for PDFs which include either receipt or invoice.

Personally I keep account records for a year in a dedicated notebook. Or you could add a tag.

Remember that Evernote only scans the content of PDFs provided it hasn't  already been OCRed by the PDF creating program.

So tell us more about how you create your receipts and name the notes and it should be easy to suggest a search that will get you most of the way there.

But I think using a dedicated notebook or tag would be easier. That will be a challenge too for a Free account. Moving or tagging lots of notes is likely to hit the upload limits quite quickly.

 

[bswiss56 8]

Thx agstelle!

The note containing receipt PDFs (scanned by ScanSnap) all contained the word "Receipt" in the title.

They all include receipts only - no invoice.
I have tagged them with "receipt" and the year and the store name and the purchase type such as "Groceries". And yes they are all in a dedicated notebook. They are easy to find.

But what i would like to do is extract some data out of these receipts (PDF).
For example: date of purchase, (total) amount spend-and export to an Excel sheet for further processing/statistics/prove for taxes and other.

Maybe you have an idea...

Thx a lot.


 

 

[gazumped 12,073]

Hi.  Evernote doesn't have any way to parse the data it has stored - you could find all your scanned notes,  or all the notes with intitle:receipt 

You could export the notes (and/or attachments) to HTML / PDF or ENEX;  but getting the date and amount from each one would need some third-party assistance.

Based on the current hype,  I'd bet some variant of ChatGPT could do something for you - but you'd have to investigate that angle for yourself,  and NB AI services are not private and are not guaranteed to be accurate.  There's ongoing supervision of responses,  and I've had a couple of cases where responses to my questions were just completely wrong.  When challenged the AI response was "I'm sorry that was incorrect - I'm only a chat service..."

There is another option - a service called Filterize which can extract data from Evernote notes.  Again I'm not sure how much is possible,  but you could have a look here - https://filterize.net/note-filter/  I use the service to tag and sort notes.

Evernote's advanced search syntax is described in more detail here:  https://help.evernote.com/hc/en-us/articles/208313828

[S Tucker 0]

I am using Evernote for many years now.  The wildcard function has never worked for me.

I would like to search for example a bank account last 4 digits: 1234.

I search for just :1234 or *1234 but it doesn't work.

It will only return instances where 1234 occurs with a space before or after it.

But not in instances like this: 99991234.

Is this not a possibility with Evernote's vast searching capabilities?

Am I missing something?

Please advise.

 

[gazumped 12,073]

On 6/3/2024 at 2:40 AM, S Tucker said:

Am I missing something?

Hi.  Sorry - search is only possible for leading characters.  

https://help.evernote.com/hc/en-us/articles/208313828-Use-advanced-search-syntax

[Mailbuoy 4]

On 4/19/2023 at 3:33 AM, bswiss56 said:

But what i would like to do is extract some data out of these receipts (PDF).

PDFZone is app for macOS that will extract data from a .pdf.  I would think you might first have to do your Evernote search and export the results??? 

[S Tucker 0]

thanks for the reply.  What does that mean exactly - that would seem to be an extremely serious limitation of the entire search function.  I don't see anything referencing leading characters in the article you sent.

Best.

[Mike P 2,982]

36 minutes ago, S Tucker said:

I don't see anything referencing leading characters in the article you sent.

It's actually in the full search grammar which is referenced from the document that @gazumped quoted. And for the record this has alweays been the case and is not a V10 thing.

Quote

Words in the content of the note are split by whitespace or punctuation. Words may end in a wildcard to match the start of a word. Searches are not case sensitive. (A wildcard is only permitted at the end of the term, not at the beginning or middle for scalability reasons on the service.)

 

[MvdH 490]

It's also logical. Most software does this, because it makes indexation and fast results and lower storage and lower memory possible. Imagine searching for a word in an alphabatized list, in 32 steps you can find anything this way in a list of 2.000.000.000 items very fast: you can half the search list each time and find your desired result. It's called a binary search. 

[Cristiano478 242]

Em 02/06/2024 at 22:40, S Tucker disse:

 

I search for just :1234 or *1234 but it doesn't work.

I don't think you know, but the wildcard character (*) can only be used at the end of the text. It doesn't work if placed at the beginning or in the middle.

[Mike P 2,982]

1 hour ago, Cristiano478 said:

I don't think you know, but the wildcard character (*) can only be used at the end of the text.

I don't think you know, but that was pointed out by @gazumped 4 days ago.