Cli

Automating the handling of bank and financial statements

Programming
In my perpetual effort to get out of work, I’ve developed a suite of automation tools to help file statements that I download from banks, credit cards and others. While my setup described here is tuned to my specific needs, any of the ideas should be adaptable for your particular circumstances. For the purposes of this post, I’m going to assume you already have Hazel. None of what follows will be of much use to you without it. I’ll also emphasize that this is a macOS-specific post. Bear in mind, too, that companies have the nasty habit of tweaking their statement formats. That fact alone makes any approach like this fragile; so be aware that maintaining these rules is just part of the game. With that out of the way, let’s dive in.
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Converting Cyrillic UTF-8 text encoded as Latin-1

Programming

This may be obvious to some, but visually-recognizing character encoding at a glance is not always obvious.

For example, pronunciation files downloaded form Forvo have the following appearance:

pronunciation_ru_оÑ‚бывание.mp3

How can we extact the actual word from this gibberish? Optimally, the filename should reflect that actual word uttered in the pronunciation file, after all.

Step 1 - Extracting the interesting bits

The gibberish begins after the pronunciation_ru_ and ends before the file extension. Any regex tool can tease that out.

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accentchar: a command-line utility to apply Russian stress marks

Programming

I’ve written a lot about applying and removing syllabic stress marks in Russian text because I use it a lot when making Anki cards.

This iteration is a command line tool for applying the stress mark at a particular character index. The advantage of these little shell tools is that they can be composable, integrating into different tools as the need arises.

#!/usr/local/bin/zsh

while getopts i:w: flag
do
    case "${flag}" in
        i) index=${OPTARG};;
        w) word=${OPTARG};;
    esac
done

if [ $word ]; then
    temp=$word
else
    read temp
fi

outword=""
for (( i=0; i<${#temp}; i++ )); do
    thischar="${temp:$i:1}"
    if [ $i -eq $index ]; then
        thischar=$(echo $thischar | perl -C -pe 's/(.)/\1\x{301}/g;')
    fi
    outword="$outword$thischar"
done

echo $outword

We can use it in a couple different ways. For example, we can provide all of the arguments in a declarative way:

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