Pulling dollar amounts from DoD Contract Awards

Question

I'm going through Department of Defense press releases (here) looking for dollar amounts greater than $500 million. Each document is between 1,000 and 15,000 words, with dollar amounts inline with normal discussion text. There are about 2,500 documents I would like to review. My hit rate so far (manually) is about 1 in 8, so for every 8 documents I search I find one with a dollar amount that I'm looking for. Once I find a contract worth, say $546 million, I record the company, the date, and a brief description.

So my question is, how can I automate finding documents with numbers >500,000,000?

Here is an example of one paragraph

General Dynamics Electric Boat Corp., Groton, Connecticut, is being awarded a $234,229,426 cost-plus-fixed-fee contract for design agent, planning yard, engineering and technical support for active nuclear submarines. The efforts [...] This contract includes options, which, if exercised, would bring the cumulative value of this contract to $1,537,500,654. Work will be performed in Groton, Connecticut (73 percent); Bangor, Washington (9 percent); Norfolk, Virginia (6 percent); Newport, Rhode Island (4 percent); Quonset, Rhode Island (3 percent); Kings Bay, Georgia (3 percent); and Pearl Harbor, Hawaii (2 percent), and is expected to be completed by Sept. 30, 2015. Fiscal 2014 other procurement (Navy); fiscal 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014 shipbuilding conversion (Navy); fiscal 2014 research, development, test and evaluation; and fiscal 2014 operations and maintenance (Navy) funding in the amount of $20,333,452 will be obligated at the time of award, and contract funds in the amount of $1,520,650 will expire at the end of the fiscal year. This contract was not competitively procured in accordance with FAR 6.302-1(a)(2)(iii) - only one responsible source and no other supplies or services will satisfy agency requirements. The Naval Sea Systems Command, Washington, District of Columbia, is the contracting activity (N00024-14-C-2104).

I think it should be possible to turn that into something like

$234,229,426

$1,537,500,654

$20,333,452

$1,520,650

Which I could easily glance at to see if I should go back and read the document. It would be even better if I could just see the 1,537,500,654 number.

So I really have no coding skills of any type and was hoping that wouldn't be necessary. I don't need it to be perfect. I can copy and paste things, but I would like to make this easier somehow. I really have no idea where to start and what applications might be relevant to my plight. I've got access to Macs and PCs. Any advice you can give is appreciated.

Answer 1

Create a new bookmark and paste the following code into the location field:

javascript:%20(function(){var%20s%20=%20'';%20var%20d;%20$.ajax({url%20:%20document.URL,%20success%20:%20function(result){var%20d%20=%20/[$](\d[,]?)+/g%20;%20while%20(m=d.exec(result))%20{s%20+=%20m[0]+'\n';}%20alert(s);}});})();

Save it under a name like "Show dollar values". This is a bookmarklet. Click it on a webpage and it will pop up an alert with a list of all dollar values that occur on the page.

The code above relies on JQuery, so if the web page you're using it on doesn't already load JQuery, you'll need to use this Append JQuery bookmarklet first.

customizing the match.

It's fairly easy to modify the values the bookmarklet displays. For instance, the code below is modified to only display 9-figure or higher amounts:

javascript:%20(function(){var%20s%20=%20'';%20var%20d;%20$.ajax({url%20:%20document.URL,%20success%20:%20function(result){var%20d%20=%20/[$](\d[,]?){8}(\d[,]?)+/g%20;%20while%20(m=d.exec(result))%20{s%20+=%20m[0]+'\n';}%20alert(s);}});})();

If you find the {8} in that code and replace it by another number, say N, you'll change the cut-off number of digits N+1.

If you wanted to customize this bookmarklet for more general use, you'll need to look up "Javascript regular expressions" to learn the syntax you'll need. This part (/[$](\d[,]?)+/g) of the code is what controls the matching. If you change the part between / and /g, you'll change what the bookmarklet matches.