When setting up Docparser, you might stumble into a situation when no data is returned by a parsing rule. There are various possible reasons which can lead to such a situation. This article will show you how to identify and resolve possible root causes for empty parsing results.
No text data found in selected area
In some rare cases, Docparser is not able to read any text data from your documents even though you can see text when looking at your document. Instead of the text of the document, the parsing rule editor shows the error message "We were unable to extract any text from your document. Please go back to the previous step and try to select a specific area".
To resolve this issue, you can try the following:
- Make sure you selected an area which contains text in the first step of the parsing rule editor. You can also remove the area selection entirely which should then return the text of all document pages.
- If still no text data is returned, it probably means that the text in your document is actually an image and Docparser did not automatically apply Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to your document. To make sure OCR is correctly applied to all documents uploaded to your document parser, go to 'Settings > Preprocessing' and set 'Perform OCR' to 'Yes - always perform OCR'. Now you can upload new sample documents and then go back to the parsing rule editor. The new documents which you uploaded after changing the preprocessing settings should now contain text data.
- If you still see the error message shown above, please contact our support staff and we will have a closer look. Please include the name of the document parser and the name of the parsing rule in your support request.
Text or table filters return no data
Another cause for empty parsing results are often text or table filters which are not able to make sense of the data provided to them. An example for this can be seen in the screenshot below.
If you experience an issue where a text or table filter is returning an empty result, we recommend to first check if the settings of the filter in question seem to make sense.
Sometimes, a filter works for one document but won't work for another document because the documents are slightly different. A good way to check if the filter works for another document is to switch the sample document in the top right corner of the parsing rule editor.
If the settings of the filter seem to make sense but still no data is returned, please don't hesitate to contact our support staff. Please include the name of the document parser and the name of the parsing rule in your support request.
If you have created parsing rules but the download or preview pane is showing as empty or the following:
Ensure to requeue your documents through the parsing queue - after adding or editing rules it is a necessary step to select your documents and choose "Perform Action > Move To Parse Queue" to have those rules apply to any documents that were imported before the changes.