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Extracting variable length string from PDF multiple occurences

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Posted on by StanM

I am using Power Automate Desktop. I have a PDF file containing multiple rows of invoice numbers and amounts with a total line by vendor. There are several vendors / total amount lines in the file. The amounts are of variable length. I populate an Excel sheet with the total amount.

I used the CROP function to find the value between text "Total for Vendor" and "Next Vendor".

The first occurence works perfectly.

How can I advance to the next occurence of the text "Total for Vendor" and CROP the amount? It seems CROP starts at the top of the file each time, so I keep retrieving the same amount.

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Agnius Bartninkas Most Valuable Professional on at

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Instead of using Crop text, use Parse text and enable regular expressions. You can then retrieve all instances of the same pattern from a blob of text into a list.

If you are not familiar with regex, we can likely help you build it, if you provide a sample text as extracted from the PDF file, with the details of the specific values you want to extract.

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StanM 23 on at

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Hi, Agnius, thanks for your reply.
I am not familiar with regex.
Attached are some sample data, I am trying to retrieve the $ amounts. For Parse text I search for "Total for Vendor". Then I increase position by a number to get to the first character of the amount. Since each amount is a different length, when I use Get subtext and enter a fixed length, I may pick up text from "Next Vendor"

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Agnius Bartninkas Most Valuable Professional on at

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You can try using the following regex:

(?<=\$)(\d+,)?\d+\.\d+

Put this into the Parse text action, and make sure you enable regular expressions.

Also, disable the toggle that extracts the first occurrence only.

This will result into a list of matches in a variable called %Matches%. It will contain all the amounts from the text blob.

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If I have answered your question, please mark it as the preferred solution. If you like my response, please give it a Thumbs Up.

I also provide paid consultancy and development services using Power Automate. If you're interested, DM me and we can discuss it.

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StanM 23 on at

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Thanks, Agnius, this worked well !!

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