How do I extract the date, say, "january 16, 2016" from a large chunk of text with regex?

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Hi,

I am OCRing some bills from my scanner with a well-known OCR library. It's very good, and returns all the text it finds as a big string filled with the OCR'd text.

Near the top of the bill, there is a line that says

January 16, 2016

I have tried splitting the output into lines, but it's on a different line for each bill, always in the same <long month>, <day number>, <four-digit year> format.

What is a Regex I can use to munch on the text, and pick out the date in that format?

What I have tried:

I've google searched and searched but I am probably not using the right searches. Any tips would help!

Posted 17-Oct-17 17:39pm

Brian C Hart86.6K

Updated 17-Oct-17 17:58pm

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Peter_in_2780 · Answer 1 · 2017-10-17T17:58:00

First thing, grab a copy of Expresso.
Your regex will probably wind up something like
/January|February|....|December\s*\d{1,2}\s*,\s*\d{4}/
I've thrown in the \s*s so it will be tolerant of variable amounts of whitespace (from my experience of OCR).
Feel free to munch this up however you like.

edit: oops! removed spurious []

edit2: corrected spelling of Expresso