Trouble with date matching

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Trouble with date matching Mon Jan 18, 2016 9:59 pm • by Thrivix
Hey everyone, just picked up hazel and a scansnap in an attempt to get organized *cough*yaright*cough* and I've ran into an issue with date matching on the power bills. I scanned them, ran them through OCR (both the scan snap package and ABBYY finereader that comes as part of the scan snap package as part of my troubleshooting) but am unable to get it to recognize it. I had my rules working initially when I was just using "date created" but I'd greatly prefer to use the statement date so that it gets filed into the proper month. I Apologize for the photo vomit but I'm not sure how to describe it otherwise. My custom date field gets modified a few times over the course of the rule, from being a alphanumeric field, to strictly numeric and from full date down to year/month and finally year. Not sure if that's what would cause this to fail or if it's an OCR issue. I scanned this at 300dpi so I don't believe quality should be a determining factor in that...

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Any insight into where I'm going wrong would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Thrivix
 
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Joined: Mon Jan 18, 2016 9:27 pm

Re: Trouble with date matching Tue Jan 19, 2016 10:11 am • by Mr_Noodle
Go through the troubleshooting guide stickied at the top of this forum. That should at least isolate if the problem is in matching the rules (the conditions) or executing them (the actions). If it's in the conditions, you need to check the text of the document. Open it in Preview and then copy & paste it into a blank TextEdit document. There you can see the actual text close to what Hazel sees. That may shed some light on why it's not matching.

If it's failing on execution then you'll need to post/email in the relevant logs.
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Re: Trouble with date matching Thu Jan 21, 2016 11:27 pm • by Thrivix
Went through the troubleshooting guide and have played around with it. Everything seems to hang up with the date match. If I change conditions to 'any' it will rename them and move them but the file names won't have any dates attached (shows up as "-powerbill) and the subfolder is named the same as the origin folder rather than split into a folder based on year. I copied and pasted into textedit and while some of the OCR is questionable it's mostly regarding logos and such, the date at the top of the bill comes out exactly as it's displayed "Statement Date December 23, 2015". I've tried with and without the comma as well as including the statement date portion as a precursor to no avail. I understand it may be a simple formatting issue but I have absolutely no idea where to begin as I don't think I can make it 'match' the format any better. Unless I'm missing some detail and am barking up the wrong alley? any guidance would help. Thanks!
Thrivix
 
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Joined: Mon Jan 18, 2016 9:27 pm

Re: Trouble with date matching Fri Jan 22, 2016 11:41 am • by Mr_Noodle
The other thing to check is the "Contents contain" conditions. Search for those terms in Spotlight. If the file in question doesn't show up in the results, then it won't match in Hazel either. In that case, you'll have to look into seeing why that file isn't being indexed by Spotlight or use "contain match" instead, which will bypass Spotlight and do a direct scan of the file.
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Re: Trouble with date matching Thu Feb 25, 2016 5:50 pm • by Thrivix
Sorry for the late response, got caught up with life and this project fell by the wayside. I did the spotlight search as you recommended and the pdf files were the top options with an exact match. It leads me to believe that it may be the way I'm formatting/attempting to use the date matching. Looking at it, I believe it to be correct based on what I read off the bill as well as what I searched for using spotlight but clearly something I'm trying to do is causing things to hangup. Am I misunderstanding the contain match token? My thought process is if the file contains "Utility company name" and a date format that matches "Month Day Year" (December 23 2016 in this case) I could then use the date information to rename and sort the file. But I could be incredibly wrong and assuming things here. Thanks!
Thrivix
 
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Joined: Mon Jan 18, 2016 9:27 pm

Re: Trouble with date matching Fri Feb 26, 2016 11:56 am • by Mr_Noodle
At this point, it might be best if you email support with a copy of your rule and a file that is supposed to match but doesn't.
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