I am establishing a .pdf data scraper for technical reports.
Original data is mostly in multiple-page .pdf form where useful data is only on the first page.

With the PyPDF2 module I merged all the first pages into a big single .pdf file that contains all the first pages of the tech reports.

I used PdfReader to append strings of text of each page as a string to a list.
For illustration the list will look like this =>
list_o_text= [ ‘Random string 1 2 3 45 6789 999999 22222’, ‘Example tech report 444444’ ]

Every string in list_o_text contains definitely contains one or more 5 or 6-digit numbers.

I recently found the RE module. Yet I’m having problems finding the proper function to search for them.

I would appreciate help.

#########################################################################
Attempt with findall()
IDLE IMPUT:_______

import re

list_o_text= [ 'Random string 1 2 3 45 6789 999999 22222', 'Example tech report 444444' ]

for n in range(len(list_o_text)):
find = re.findall('d{5}+',list_o_text[n])
print(find)

IDLE SHELL OUTPUT:___

[‘99999’, ‘22222’]
[‘44444’]

Note: the six-digit number ‘999999’ is not found in its entirety

Attempt with search()
IDLE INPUT:_______

import re

list_o_text= [ 'Random string 1 2 3 45 6789 999999 22222', 'Example tech report 444444' ]

for n in range(len(list_o_text)):
find = re.search('d{5}+',list_o_text[n])
print(find

IDLE SHELL OUTPUT:___
<re.Match object; span=(28, 33), match=’99999′>
<re.Match object; span=(20, 25), match=’44444′>

Note: gives positions and on top of that the ranges don’t account for 6-digit numbers

Attempt with search().group()

import re

list_o_text= [ 'Random string 1 2 3 45 6789 999999 22222', 'Example tech report 444444' ]

for n in range(len(list_o_text)):
find = re.search('d{5}+',list_o_text[n]).group()
print(find)

IDLE SHELL OUTPUT:___
99999
44444

Note: the six-digit number ‘999999’ is not found in its entirety

#################################################################
CONVOLUTED SOLUTION
I used all three methods, yet can’t shake the feeling that it could be simpler

IDLE INPUT:_______

`import re

list_o_text= [ 'Random string 1 2 3 45 6789 999999 22222', 'Example tech report 444444' ]

for n in range(len(list_o_text)):
    find_all = re.findall('d{5}+',list_o_text[n])  
    #1st loop result is ['99999','22222']

    for five_d_num in find_all:
        
        find_start = re.search(five_d_num,list_o_text[n]).start()

        find = re.search('d+',list_o_text[n][find_start: ]).group()
    
        print(find)

IDLE SHELL OUTPUT:___
999999
22222
444444

That’s that.