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Parsing a Result PDF to Find Your Roll Number in Seconds

Government exam results in India are often published as long PDFs with thousands of roll numbers. Searching them in a browser works, but when you are checking for a whole group of friends or students, a script is faster.

Install 

pip install pdfplumber
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Script 

import pdfplumber, sys

pdf_path = sys.argv[1]
targets = set(sys.argv[2:])

with pdfplumber.open(pdf_path) as pdf:
    for i, page in enumerate(pdf.pages, start=1):
        text = page.extract_text() or ""
        for t in targets:
            if t in text:
                print(f"{t} found on page {i}")
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Run it with:

python find_roll.py result.pdf 2401001234 2401005678
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Caveats

  • Some PDFs are scanned images. You will need OCR (for example pytesseract) for those.
  • Roll numbers can be split across lines in tables. Normalise whitespace if you get misses.
  • Always confirm with the official PDF before celebrating.

Where do the PDFs come from? Official board sites, or a tracker that links to them. I use the Sarkari results page on govtpvt.com, which links the official result notice for each exam.

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