Ubuntu – Find and replace with on PDF file from command line

command linepdftext processing

I want to find specific text or word from PDF file and replace it with another text and make a new PDF file from command-line. I tried with sed, find, awk series on text files but I want to get on PDF file. Which command line utility will help me?

Best Answer

Use pdftk to uncompress the file, then edit via sed and finally recompress it.

pdftk input.pdf output uncompressed.pdf uncompress
sed -i 's/foo/bar/g' uncompressed.pdf
# uncompressed.pdf now has all the changes
pdftk uncompressed.pdf output changed.pdf compress

Of course any text in images cannot be changes like this.

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Ubuntu – Find and replace text within a file using commands

sed -i 's/original/new/g' file.txt

Explanation:

sed = Stream EDitor
-i = in-place (i.e. save back to the original file)
The command string:
- s = the substitute command
- original = a regular expression describing the word to replace (or just the word itself)
- new = the text to replace it with
- g = global (i.e. replace all and not just the first occurrence)
file.txt = the file name

Ubuntu – command-line utility app which can find a specific block of lines in a text file, and replace it

This simple python script should do the task:


#!/usr/bin/env python

# Syntax: multiline-replace.py input.txt search.txt replacement.txt

import sys

inp = open(sys.argv[1]).read()
needle = open(sys.argv[2]).read()
replacement = open(sys.argv[3]).read()

sys.stdout.write(inp.replace(needle,replacement))

Like most other solutions, it has the disadvantage that the whole file is slurped into memory at once. For small text files, it should work well enough, however.

Best Answer

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Ubuntu – Find and replace text within a file using commands

Ubuntu – command-line utility app which can find a specific block of lines in a text file, and replace it

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