paytext

Python package to generalize texts from payments.

Motivation

When categorizing payments, I want to avoid categorizing the same type of expense multiple times. Often, the only information we have about a payment is the date, amount and a slightly cryptic string. For example, I recently bought some plane tickets using Ticket. On my account statement, that produced a string similar to this one: *4274 25.06 NOK 4101.00 WWW.TICKET.NO Kurs: 1.0000.

Now, when I put this payment in the Travel category, I'd like all future payments to the same vendor to be automatically put in the same category. But the next time I buy a plane ticket from them, the date and amount will be different. Also, the leading card number may be different, too. So, in order to automate the categorization, we need to generalize the text. In other words, *4274 25.06 NOK 4101.00 WWW.TICKET.NO Kurs: 1.0000 needs to become WWW.TICKET.NO. That's what this tiny package does.

Installation

Use Pipenv: pipenv install paytext

Usage

from paytext import PaymentText

payment_text: PaymentText = PaymentText(
    '*4274 25.06 NOK 4101.00 WWW.TICKET.NO Kurs: 1.0000',
)

print(payment_text) # Output: '*4274 25.06 NOK 4101.00 WWW.TICKET.NO Kurs: 1.0000' 

payment_text.generalize()

print(payment_text) # Output: 'WWW.TICKET.NO'

Known limitations

I've mostly had strings from transactions with Norwegian merchants and banks to work with, so this package probably won't work as well with other languages/locales. If you find strings that it doesn't handle well, please open an issue on GitHub.

Running tests

Run the command nosetests.

Upload new release to the Python Package Index

1. Update version number in setup.py.
2. Make new distribution: python setup.py sdist bdist_wheel
3. Upload to PyPI: twine upload dist/*