Find blank pages in PDF

Samy_rio has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi monks, I need to find the blank pages in PDF. I did super search, but I didn't got any links about this.

I tried in CAM::PDF, in the given pdf file the page is blank but it may contain header information in each page. That is,

03371 
_ 
FM 
_ 
i 
-xv 
i 
.qx 
d 

6/28/06 

7 
: 
31 

PM 

P 
age 
i
[download]

The following code is not displaying blank pages.

use CAM::PDF;
my $doc = CAM::PDF->new($ARGV[0]) || die "$CAM::PDF::errstr\n";
my $pages = $doc->numPages();
print $pages;

for (1..$pages)
{
print $_ if ($doc->getPageText($_) eq '');
}
[download]

Please suggest me how to find the blank page in PDF?

Regards,
Velusamy R.

eval"print uc\"\\c$_\""for split'','j)@,/6%@0%2,`e@3!-9v2)/@|6%,53!-9@2~j';

Comment on Find blank pages in PDF Select or Download Code

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Find blank pages in PDF by marto (Cardinal) on Jul 04, 2006 at 13:04 UTC
Samy_rio, Check out CAM::PDF::PageText "Turn a page content tree into a string", which may be what you need to determin if the page has anything on it. Sadly I can not test this for you at the moment due to being at work :( Hope this helps Martin	[reply]
Re: Find blank pages in PDF by starbolin (Hermit) on Jul 07, 2006 at 04:35 UTC
Your code assumes getPageText() returns an empty string when there are no text blocks in the PDF. This is probably an incorrect assumption. In general, a function in list context could be returning a false (-1), an undef or a string with whitespace. (tab, cr, etc). Try this: `{ my $foo = $doc->getPageText($_) ; print $_ unless (defined $foo && # Returned something and, $foo =~ m/[[:alnum:]]+/ms ); # actually returned text }` [download] Sorry, I didn't actually test this. update: fixed that dratted ~=/=~ update: fixed regex, tested now. s//----->\t/;$~="JAPH";s//\r<$~~/;{s\|~$~-\|-~$~\|\|\|s \|-$~~\|$~~-\|\|\|s,<$~~,<~$~,,s,~$~>,$~~>,, $\|=1,select$,,$,,$,,1e-1;print;redo}	[reply] [d/l]