Grabbing details from Grab Food activities screenshot

Extracting expenses from Grab Screenshots to a CSV for budget expense tracking

Source code: Github

Since it was the end of the month, and I failed to record the expenses as we made them, I had to encode all of those data from apps like Grab to a spreadsheet for our family’s budget tracking.

But considering that I dislike repetitive work, I decided to create a tool for it. This time, I used Go to create the CLI tool just because I’m learning in the context of web services.

The Idea

The idea is that I would take screenshots of the grab app’s Activities page, and then I would airdrop it off to my macbook. I would then proceed to run the CLI tool to extract those details over to a CSV file.

Pretty simple and straightforward, considering no R&D has to be done on my end. There’s already years of research done for the opensource OCR called as Tesseract which made things super easy for me to implement my idea.

All I had to implement is the logic to determine which text is useful, and which is not. Saving to a CSV is done using Go’s standard library, which was pretty straight forward to use… Just pass in a slice of slices and call it a day.

Here’s how I use it:

Pretty straightforward. I just airdrop images to my mac and then execute the CLI app.

Conclusion

Go is a super simple language that one can get into within a couple of hours and be productive to the point that you can actually deliver value. On top of that, the compiler is the fastest I’ve ever used, making it a valid borderline replacement for scripts. Just do go run main.go and move on with life.

However, I’m not sure if I’m a fan of its overly simplistic features. I just can’t pinpoint what it is that makes me feel a bit off with Go.

Oh, and tesseract is packaged in a way that it’s pretty straightforward to use. The tool that I made is 99% done by tesseract, and the only implementation I had to do is how to make sense of the text, extract it in a way that makes sense in the context of budget tracking.