pdf4py 0.0.1

A PDF parser written in Python3 with no external dependencies.

pdf4py

A PDF parser written in Python 3 with no external dependencies.

The package pdf4py allows the user to interact with a PDF file at a low level and to build higher level functionalities (e.g. text and/or image extraction). In particular, it defines the class Parser that reads the Cross Reference Table of a PDF document and uses its entries to give the user the ability to locate PDF objects within the file and parse them into suitable Python objects.

Quick example

Here is a quick demostration on how to use pdf4py.

>>> from pdf4py.parser import Parser
>>> fp = open('tests/pdfs/0000.pdf', 'rb')
>>> parser = Parser(fp)
>>> info_ref = parser.trailer['Info']
>>> print(info_ref)
PDFReference(object_number=114, generation_number=0)
>>> info = parser.parse_reference(info_ref).value
>>> print(info)
{'Creator': PDFLiteralString(value=b'PaperCept Conference Management System'),
    ... , 'Producer': PDFLiteralString(value=b'PDFlib+PDI 7.0.3 (Perl 5.8.0/Linux)')}
>>> creator = info['Creator'].value.decode('utf8')
>>> print(creator)
PaperCept Conference Management System

Extracting text or images

Extracting text from a PDF and other higher level analysis tasks are not natively supported because of two reasons:

• their complexity is not trivial and would require a not indifferent amount of work which now I prefer investing into developing a complete and reliable parser;
• they are conceptually different tasks from PDF parsing, since the PDF does not define the concept of structured document from the content point of view.

Therefore, they require a separate implementation built on top of pdf4py.

Why this package

One day at work I was asked to analyze some PDF files; to my surprise I have discovered that there is not an established Python module to easily parse a PDF document. In order to understand why I delved into the PDF 1.7 specification: since from moment on, I got more and more interested in the inner workings of one of the most important and ubiquitous file format. And what's a better way to understand the PDF than writing a parser for it?

PDF standard coverage

You can check how many features of the standard are implemented and what is the progress on supporting the missing ones by checking the standard coverage page.

Contributing

Contributions are more than welcome! You can

• filing a new issue;
• proposing changes and additions through a pull request.