Get the number of pages in a PDF document

A simple command line executable called: pdfinfo.

It is downloadable for Linux and Windows. You download a compressed file containing several little PDF-related programs. Extract it somewhere.

One of those files is pdfinfo (or pdfinfo.exe for Windows). An example of data returned by running it on a PDF document:

Title:          test1.pdfAuthor:         John SmithCreator:        PScript5.dll Version 5.2.2Producer:       Acrobat Distiller 9.2.0 (Windows)CreationDate:   01/09/13 19:46:57ModDate:        01/09/13 19:46:57Tagged:         yesForm:           nonePages:          13    <-- This is what we needEncrypted:      noPage size:      2384 x 3370 pts (A0)File size:      17569259 bytesOptimized:      yesPDF version:    1.6

I haven't seen a PDF document where it returned a false pagecount (yet). It is also really fast, even with big documents of 200+ MB the response time is a just a few seconds or less.

There is an easy way of extracting the pagecount from the output, here in PHP:

// Make a function for convenience function getPDFPages($document){    $cmd = "/path/to/pdfinfo";           // Linux    $cmd = "C:\\path\\to\\pdfinfo.exe";  // Windows        // Parse entire output    // Surround with double quotes if file name has spaces    exec("$cmd \"$document\"", $output);    // Iterate through lines    $pagecount = 0;    foreach($output as $op)    {        // Extract the number        if(preg_match("/Pages:\s*(\d+)/i", $op, $matches) === 1)        {            $pagecount = intval($matches[1]);            break;        }    }        return $pagecount;}// Use the functionecho getPDFPages("test 1.pdf");  // Output: 13

Of course this command line tool can be used in other languages that can parse output from an external program, but I use it in PHP.

I know its not pure PHP, but external programs are way better in PDF handling (as seen in the question).

I hope this can help people, because I have spent a whole lot of time trying to find the solution to this and I have seen a lot of questions about PDF pagecount in which I didn't find the answer I was looking for. That's why I made this question and answered it myself.

Simplest of all is using ImageMagick

here is a sample code

$image = new Imagick();$image->pingImage('myPdfFile.pdf');echo $image->getNumberImages();

otherwise you can also use PDF libraries like MPDF or TCPDF for PHP

You can use qpdf like below. If a file file_name.pdf has 100 pages,

$ qpdf --show-npages file_name.pdf100