Improved regular expression to only match for (unicode) characters in month names + parsed one regex match after another until one gave a parsable date

src/paperless_tesseract/parsers.py

@@ -200,6 +200,9 @@ class RasterisedDocumentParser(DocumentParser):
         return text
 
     def get_date(self):
+        date = None
+        datestring = None
+
         try:
             text = self.get_text()
         except ParseError as e:
@@ -213,23 +216,32 @@ class RasterisedDocumentParser(DocumentParser):
         # - XX. MONTH ZZZZ with XX being 1 or 2 and ZZZZ being 2 or 4 digits
         # - MONTH ZZZZ, with ZZZZ being 4 digits
         # - MONTH XX, ZZZZ with XX being 1 or 2 and ZZZZ being 4 digits
-        m = re.search(
+        pattern = re.compile(
             r'\b([0-9]{1,2})[\.\/-]([0-9]{1,2})[\.\/-]([0-9]{4}|[0-9]{2})\b|' +
             r'\b([0-9]{1,2}[\. ]+[^ ]{3,9} ([0-9]{4}|[0-9]{2}))\b|' +
-            r'\b([\w]{3,9} [0-9]{1,2}, ([0-9]{4}))\b|' +
+            r'\b([^\W\d_]{3,9} [0-9]{1,2}, ([0-9]{4}))\b|' +
-            r'\b([\w]{3,9} [0-9]{4})\b', text)
+            r'\b([^\W\d_]{3,9} [0-9]{4})\b')
 
-        if m is None:
+        # Iterate through all regex matches and try to parse the date
-            return None
+        for m in re.finditer(pattern, text):
+            datestring = m.group(0)
 
-        date = dateparser.parse(m.group(0),
+            try:
+                date = dateparser.parse(
+                           datestring,
                            settings={'DATE_ORDER': self.DATE_ORDER,
                                      'PREFER_DAY_OF_MONTH': 'first',
                                      'RETURN_AS_TIMEZONE_AWARE': True})
+            except TypeError:
+                # Skip all matches that do not parse to a proper date
+                continue
+
+            if date is not None:
+                break
 
         if date is not None:
             self.log("info", "Detected document date " + date.strftime("%x") +
-                             " based on string " + m.group(0))
+                             " based on string " + datestring)
         else:
             self.log("info", "Unable to detect date for document")