ExtractFoxEngineering
Every engineering post on the ExtractFox blog.
Passport MRZ format explained: fields, check digits, and parser code
How to parse passport MRZ data under ICAO 9303: TD3 field positions, check digits, example MRZ lines, Python parser code, and when to extract the full passport instead.
How to remove metadata from a PDF (for privacy)
Author, software, GPS, edit history — every PDF leaks more than you think. The reliable ways to strip metadata before sharing, in any tool you already have.
How to extract city and country from a location string
Parse city, region, and country out of messy location strings — "NYC", "Greater London", "Bay Area", "remote, mostly Lisbon-based" — with copy-paste Python: libpostal first, geocoding second, schema-based AI last.
How to extract text from an image using Python
Tesseract via pytesseract, EasyOCR, PaddleOCR, and the API-based path — what each one is best at, what they break on, and the few lines of code to get started.
How to extract data from a PDF in C#
A working engineer's tour of the PDF extraction libraries in the .NET ecosystem — iText, PdfPig, Azure Document Intelligence, and the API-first alternative when you don't want to ship a parser at all.