How to extract the title of a PDF document from within a script for renaming?

Question

I have thousands of PDF files in my computers which names are from a0001.pdf to a3621.pdf, and inside of each there is a title; e.g. \"aluminum carbona

Answer 1

You can use pdfminer library to parse the PDFs. The info property contains the Title of the PDF. Here is what a sample info looks like :

[{'CreationDate': "D:20170110095753+05'30'", 'Producer': 'PDF-XChange Printer `V6 (6.0 build 317.1) [Windows 10 Enterprise x64 (Build 10586)]', 'Creator': 'PDF-XChange Office Addin', 'Title': 'Python Basics'}]`

Then we can extract the Title using the properties of a dictionary. Here is the whole code (including iterating all the files and renaming them):

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

start = "0000"

def convert(var):
    while len(var) < 4:
        var = "0" + var

    return var

for i in range(1,3622):
    var = str(i)
    var = convert(var)
    file_name = "a" + var + ".pdf"
    fp = open(file_name, 'rb')
    parser = PDFParser(fp)
    doc = PDFDocument(parser)
    fp.close()
    metadata = doc.info  # The "Info" metadata
    print metadata
    metadata = metadata[0]
    for x in metadata:
        if x == "Title":
            new_name = metadata[x] + ".pdf"
            os.rename(file_name,new_name)