Ian L. MrSaints

Using Python 3 + Google Cloud Vision API's OCR to extract text from photos and scanned documents

Just a quickie test in Python 3 (using Requests) to see if Google Cloud Vision can be used to effectively OCR a scanned data table and preserve its structure, in the way that products such as ABBYY FineReader can OCR an image and provide Excel-ready output.

The short answer: No. While Cloud Vision provides bounding polygon coordinates in its output, it doesn't provide it at the word or region level, which would be needed to then calculate the data delimiters.

On the other hand, the OCR quality is pretty good, if you just need to identify text anywhere in an image, without regards to its physical coordinates. I've included two examples:

####### 1. A low-resolution photo of road signs

Comprehensions in Python the Jedi way

by Bjørn Friese

Beautiful is better than ugly. Explicit is better than implicit.

-- The Zen of Python

I frequently deal with collections of things in the programs I write. Collections of droids, jedis, planets, lightsabers, starfighters, etc. When programming in Python, these collections of things are usually represented as lists, sets and dictionaries. Oftentimes, what I want to do with collections is to transform them in various ways. Comprehensions is a powerful syntax for doing just that. I use them extensively, and it's one of the things that keep me coming back to Python. Let me show you a few examples of the incredible usefulness of comprehensions.

Go vs. Scala (Akka) Concurrency

A comparison from 2 weeks using Go.

Actors vs. Functions

Akka's central principle is that there you have an ActorSystem which runs Actors. An Actor is defined as a class and it has a method to receive messages.

Idiomatic React Testing Patterns

Testing React components seems simple at first. Then you need to test something that isn't a pure interaction and things seem to break down. These 4 patterns should help you write readable, flexible tests for the type of component you are testing.

Setup

I recommend doing all setup in the most functional way possible. If you can avoid it, don't set variables in a beforeEach. This will help ensure tests are isolated and make things a bit easier to reason about. I use a pattern that gives great defaults for each test example but allows every example to override props when needed:

This document has moved!

It's now here, in The Programmer's Compendium. The content is the same as before, but being part of the compendium means that it's actively maintained.

Thanks everyone for participating in the quiz!
Many of you have posted correct answers.

What we know:

A top-level App component returns <Button /> from its render() method.

Question:

>What is the relationship between `` and this in that `Button`’s `render()`?

	mholt [9:10 AM]
	When using http.Get(), is it really necessary to read the full response body just to close it later?

	[9:10]
	The docs keep saying `Caller should close resp.Body when done reading from it.` and I keep seeing code like this:
	```
	io.Copy(ioutil.Discard, resp.Body)
	resp.Body.Close()
	```