DocDSL

A declarative DSL for extracting structured information from OCR output, PDFs, reports, and other semi-structured documents.

Instead of writing large, difficult-to-maintain regular expressions, DocDSL lets you describe what to extract using a simple, readable language while keeping extraction rules separate from your application code.

Installation

pip install docdsl

Quick Start

from docdsl import DSLTranslator, Entity

# Define reusable entities
NAME = Entity(
    name="NAME",
    pattern=r"[A-Za-z ,.'-]+"
)

POSTCODE = Entity(
    name="POSTCODE",
    pattern=r"[A-Z]{1,2}\d[A-Z\d]?\s?\d[A-Z]{2}"
)

# Create the translator
translator = DSLTranslator(
    entities=[
        NAME,
        POSTCODE,
    ]
)

# Describe what to extract
dsl = """
FIND "Name:";
SKIP UNTIL NEWLINE;
CAPTURE TARGET [@NAME];
"""

# Generate the regular expression
pattern = translator.translate(dsl)

print(pattern)

Features

• Declarative, English-like extraction language
• Reusable named entities
• Readable extraction rules
• Conditional extraction using IF
• Multi-line capture
• Capture between delimiters
• Built-in helper tokens
• Friendly syntax and validation errors
• Exact error locations with line and column information

Documentation

For the complete language reference, see DSL_REFERENCE.md.

The reference includes:

• Complete command reference
• DSL syntax
• Built-in helper tokens
• Conditional statements
• Examples
• Best practices
• Exception reference

Requirements

• Python 3.11+

Contributing

Contributions, bug reports and feature requests are welcome.

If you discover a bug or have an idea for improving DocDSL, please open an issue or submit a pull request.

License

Released under the MIT License.