In this post we will be creating a Python script that will decrypt an existing PDF file. To work with PDF files and achieve our goal, we’ll utilize the PikePDF library. PikePDF is a Python library that simplifies PDF file processing. It offers user-friendly functions for merging, splitting, and manipulating PDF documents. Additionally, the library allows for low-level access to PDF objects and enables extraction of metadata and text from PDF files.
See the snippet of Python code below where we use the PikePDF library to decrypt an existing PDF file. We start by using the ‘pikepdf.open()’ method to open our encrypted PDF file. The ‘password’ argument is used to provide the user password to decrypt the PDF file. The ‘save()’ method is then used to save the decrypted file.
In this example we are assuming the password of the encrypted file is ‘password’.
import pikepdf
pdf = pikepdf.open('my_encrypted_file.pdf', password='password')
pdf.save('my_decrypted_file.pdf')Take a look at some of our other content around the Python programming language by clicking here.