To turn receipts, forms and scanned PDFs into structured data, OCR text alone is not enough: you need to know which price belongs to which item and which date belongs to which field. This tutorial does it in Python with a document OCR API. We tested every script on three real documents: a 1994 Tesco receipt, a 2020 Polish supermarket receipt, and two typewritten 1913 receipts scanned by the U.S. National Archives.

Want to run it on your own receipts? Get a key for the OCR Wizard API .

What the API returns

You need Python with requests and a RapidAPI key in the RAPIDAPI_KEY environment variable.

import os

import requests

response = requests . post ( "https://ocr-wizard.p.rapidapi.com/ocr" , headers = { "x-rapidapi-host" : "ocr-wizard.p.rapidapi.com" , "x-rapidapi-key" : os . environ [ "RAPIDAPI_KEY" ] , } , files = { "image" : open ( "receipt.jpg" , "rb" ) } , timeout = 60 , ) result = response .…