Reading and Editing PDF’s Documents Using Python

Haider Imtiaz

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Level Up Coding

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6 min read

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Jan 12, 2021

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In this article, we will learn about how we can use python pdf modules to read and modify the pdf files. PyPDF2 is an updated version of the PyPdf module which supports the python version 3 and greater. We will work through each function of PyPDF2 to deal with pdf files.

Setup Installation:

You can find the PyPdf2 module on the PyPI a website that holds python modules files. When you install python a pip module is preinstalled with it. Using the following command will install Pypdf2 in your system. The command is the same for all Operating systems.

pip install PyPDF2

Reading PDF file:

In this section, we will learn about reading and writing pdf files let start with reading the file first thing first we need to load the Pypdf2 module in our program.

Well, line 2 shows we had loaded them PyPDF2 in our program, and then we read the pdf file using the python open() reading method. But one change we made we are not reading in normal mode we are reading it in the Byte mode using rb and next we pass out the variable that had the file in the byte form to PdfFileReader() the function which will read the pdf content. On the next line for verifying that we successfully read the pdf file or not we used numpages the method of Pypdf2 which will count the pages of our pdf and return an integer number. And in the end, we close the pdf file.

You can use PyPDF2 to extract metadata and some text from a PDF. This can be useful when you’re doing certain types of automation on your pre-existing PDF files.

Here are the current types of data that can be extracted:

• Author
• Creator
• Producer
• Subject
• Title
• Number of pages