Reading the PDF properties/metadata in Python

Solution 1:

Try pdfminer:

from pdfminer.pdfparser import PDFParser
from pdfminer.pdfdocument import PDFDocument

fp = open('diveintopython.pdf', 'rb')
parser = PDFParser(fp)
doc = PDFDocument(parser)

print(doc.info)  # The "Info" metadata

Here's the output:

>>> [{'CreationDate': 'D:20040520151901-0500',
  'Creator': 'DocBook XSL Stylesheets V1.52.2',
  'Keywords': 'Python, Dive Into Python, tutorial, object-oriented, programming, documentation, book, free',
  'Producer': 'htmldoc 1.8.23 Copyright 1997-2002 Easy Software Products, All Rights Reserved.',
  'Title': 'Dive Into Python'}]

For more info, look at this tutorial: A lightweight XMP parser for extracting PDF metadata in Python.

Solution 2:

For Python 3 see PyPDF2 with example code from @Khaleel updated to:

from PyPDF2 import PdfFileReader
pdf_toread = PdfFileReader(open("test.pdf", "rb"))
pdf_info = pdf_toread.getDocumentInfo()
print(str(pdf_info))

Install using pip install PyPDF2.

Solution 3:

For Python 3 and new pdfminer (pip install pdfminer3k):

import os
from pdfminer.pdfparser import PDFParser
from pdfminer.pdfparser import PDFDocument

fp = open("foo.pdf", 'rb')
parser = PDFParser(fp)
doc = PDFDocument(parser)
parser.set_document(doc)
doc.set_parser(parser)
if len(doc.info) > 0:
    info = doc.info[0]
    print(info)

Solution 4:

Pointed out by Morten Zilmer: pyPdf homepage says it is no longer maintained.

I have implemented this using pyPdf. Please see the sample code below.

from pyPdf import PdfFileReader
pdf_toread = PdfFileReader(open("doc2.pdf", "rb"))
pdf_info = pdf_toread.getDocumentInfo()
print(str(pdf_info))

Output:

{'/Title': u'Microsoft Word - Agnico-Eagle - Complaint (00040197-2)', '/CreationDate': u"D:20111108111228-05'00'", '/Producer': u'Acrobat Distiller 10.0.0 (Windows)', '/ModDate': u"D:20111108112409-05'00'", '/Creator': u'PScript5.dll Version 5.2.2', '/Author': u'LdelPino'}