PyPDF2 - Byte Data vs Binary Data - TypeError

Question

I am trying to get print one page of a PDF to a new PDF document. I am using the following code:

from PyPDF2 import PdfFileReader, PdfFileWriter

file_path = "/file_path/.pdf"

input_pdf = PdfFileReader(file_path)
output_file = PdfFileWriter()

cover_page = input_pdf.getPage(0)
output_file.addPage(cover_page)

with open("portion.pdf", "wb") as output_file:
    output_file.write(output_file)

When I run this code I get the following error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File ".../Extract a portion of PDF.py", line 18, in <module>
    output_file.write(output_file)
TypeError: a bytes-like object is required, not '_io.BufferedWriter'

I have specified that the output needs to write binary, so why is it saying that I must use byte-like objects?

Cheers,

Tyler Tian · Accepted Answer · 2020-07-01 03:03:17Z

1

In the with statement, you named the opened file output_file. This essentially reassigned output_file from a PdfFileWriter() to the file stream you just opened. When you tried to do output_file.write(output_file), that's basically trying to write the file stream object itself into the file stream, which makes no sense and causes the TypeError.

To fix this, simply rename the variable you used in the with statement:

with open("portion.pdf", "wb") as output_file_stream:
    output_file.write(output_file_stream)

Alternatively, you can also rename the PdfFileWriter() to output_pdf instead of output_file and change the with statement to something like:

with open("portion.pdf", "wb") as output_file:
    output_pdf.write(output_file)

which might make more sense.

answered Jul 1, 2020 at 3:03

Tyler Tian

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