How to tesseract multiple files in the same folder from command prompt?

Question

I know how to Tesseract multiple files in the same directory using Terminal on OS X.

for i in *.tif ; do tesseract $i outtext;  done;

Does anyone have suggestions for how to do this on the Command Prompt on a computer running Windows?

Answer 1

What is the Windows equivalent of the Unix for i command?

Without knowing exactly what the tesseract command does on Unix compared to Windows it is difficult to give a comprehensive answer.

On Windows you can use the for command to perform a command on several files.

From a command line:

for %i in (*.tif) do tesseract %i outtext

In a batch file:

for %%i in (*.tif) do tesseract %%i outtext

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Further Reading

• An A-Z Index of the Windows CMD command line - An excellent reference for all things Windows cmd line related.
• for - Conditionally perform a command on several files.

Answer 2

In the above example:

for %%i in (*.tif) do tesseract %%i outtext

Tesseract will write over the same output file outtext.txt for each iteration. You will end up with a single file (outtext.txt) containing only the text from the last image. You need to uniquely name each output file. You could replace the string outtext with %%i as shown below.

for %%i in (*.tif) do tesseract %%i %%i

However, if you want a different output file name, you can assign an additional variable using the set command. Then increment this variable for each iteration.

set /a j=1
for %%i in (*.tif) do (
tesseract %%i output_file%j%
set /a j+=1
)

However, %j% will expand to '1' for each iteration. You will end up with one file named outputfile1.txt. The %j% is expanded once at the beginning of the loop, and that same value is used for each iteration. Using the setlocal enabledelayedexpansion command and replacing %j% with !j! will force Windows to expand !j! for each iteration. To restore the previous environment settings a matching endlocal command should be issued.

setlocal enabledelayedexpansion
set /a j=1
for %%i in (*.tif) do (
tesseract %%i output_file!j!
set /a j+=1
)
endlocal

I tested this successfully on Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium edition. I hope it helps you.