Opening pdf urls with pyPdf

Question

How would I open a pdf from url instead of from the disk

Something like

input1 = PdfFileReader(file("http://example.com/a.pdf", "rb"))

I want to open several files from web and download a merge of all the files.

Solution 1

I think urllib2 will get you what you want.

from urllib2 import Request, urlopen
from pyPdf import PdfFileWriter, PdfFileReader
from StringIO import StringIO

url = "http://www.silicontao.com/ProgrammingGuide/other/beejnet.pdf"
writer = PdfFileWriter()

remoteFile = urlopen(Request(url)).read()
memoryFile = StringIO(remoteFile)
pdfFile = PdfFileReader(memoryFile)

for pageNum in xrange(pdfFile.getNumPages()):
        currentPage = pdfFile.getPage(pageNum)
        #currentPage.mergePage(watermark.getPage(0))
        writer.addPage(currentPage)


outputStream = open("output.pdf","wb")
writer.write(outputStream)
outputStream.close()

Solution 2

Well, you can first download the pdf separately and then use pypdf to read it

import urllib

url = 'http://example.com/a.pdf'
webFile = urllib.urlopen(url)
pdfFile = open(url.split('/')[-1], 'w')
pdfFile.write(webFile.read())
webFile.close()
pdfFile.close()

base = os.path.splitext(pdfFile)[0]
os.rename(pdfFile, base + ".pdf")

input1 = PdfFileReader(file(pdfFile, "rb"))

Solution 3

For python 3.8

import io
from urllib.request import Request, urlopen

from PyPDF2 import PdfFileReader


class GetPdfFromUrlMixin:
    def get_pdf_from_url(self, url):
        """
        :param url: url to get pdf file
        :return: PdfFileReader object
        """
        remote_file = urlopen(Request(url)).read()
        memory_file = io.BytesIO(remote_file)
        pdf_file = PdfFileReader(memory_file)
        return pdf_file

Comments

[meadhikari]

Hey, what is thisFile from the line base = os.path.splitext(thisFile)[0]

[meadhikari]

I get AttributeError: 'str' object has no attribute 'seek'

[Switch]

Oh sorry it was a mistake, it should be pdfFile (the absolute path for the downloaded file)

[John]

@meadhikari, sorry about that, it's fixed now.

[meadhikari]

When i try to write the file with outputStream = file("output.pdf","wb") I keep getting "AttributeError: addinfourl instance has no call method " any help would be much appreciated

[John]

@meadhikari Your code is good, my fault again. outputStream = file("output.pdf","wb") needs to be outputStream = open("output.pdf","wb")

[Shriganesh Kolhe]

use urllib.request instead of urllib2 for python 3.5 and higher

[Shriganesh Kolhe]

for "StringIO" use >> from io import StringIO ## for Python 3