Number of pages in a PDF file

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Posted on by nana001

In a Flow I am building I would like to obtain the number of pages in a PDF document. Is there anyway?

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Building flows

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abm abm 32,865 Most Valuable Professional on at

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Hi @nana001

Unfortunately using Power Automate this won't be possible to do.

Thanks

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nana001 87 on at

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Abm, thanks for your message.

The only other potential solution that I could find is reading the PDF file in plain text as suggested here: Solved: Re: Extracting PDF meta data and document info - Power Platform Community (microsoft.com)

However, I cannot seem to decipher the "/Pages" metadata for a PDF file. I looked through the ISO reference. Any idea how to potentially read a PDF file in plain text to get the total number of pages in it?

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seewo 59 on at

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Dear @abm @nana001
I found an imperfect solution for counting pdf pages in Power Automate: Here is the procedure for your reference:
1: extract your pdf file and set "the index numbers of the pages " to large quantity which is clearly pages out of bounds to make error-"Page out of bounds" happen . 😀
2: Make sure continue flow run in Advanced: Page out of bounds and set " Go to next action" only.
3: Get the last error and capture the error message, then split text by "," and get the textlist[1], Convert to number, then -2 and get the right page number now.😀

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Paulie78 8,422 Moderator on at

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@nana001 You can do this in a cloud flow quite easily:

Simply get the file content of a PDF file. And then create a compose action with the following expression:

sub(length(split(replace(base64ToString(outputs('Get_file_content')?['body']['$content']), 'Type/Pages', ''), 'Type/Page')),1)

This will return you the count of pages within the PDF file.

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Community Power Pla... on at

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It works. Thank you.

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Sandra Soniec 128 on at

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@seewo Couldn't get the proposed solution using regex running. Thanks for the imperfect alternative, which works perfectly for my need.

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Frederico 46 on at

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I like the approach of @Paulie78 , and I'm trying to use it to solve my problem as well. I need to insert a page number at the bottom of my pdfs pages.

Is there a way (without using the enconde connector) to insert the pages number (and be incremental as word does) in a pdf or a HTML file using Power Automate?

The following is my current flow (canvas app send to the flow a HTML code --> flow creates a file with the HTML ---> convert this file to pdf

Thanks

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JimJ 8 on at

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Thank you, this was a lifesaver!
For those unfamiliar, in Step 5 - Set Variable, you can expand the variable name to get 'Message.Trimmed.Trimmed' as shown below
For Step 7 - Set Variable I manually modified the variable to add "[1]" to get textlist[1]

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SCGC_Developer 2 on at

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This one is not work for some types of pdf . For ex, Pdf which was built from scan to pdf ( scan from machine) anyone has ideas ?

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minhvo 24 on at

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I found a solution when using AI model for extracting information.
From AI model, 'predictionOutput' variable contains the "pageCount".
For example, my pdf file has 2 pages. So, 'predictionOutput' value likes this:
{"@odata.type":"#Microsoft.Dynamics.CRM.expando","pageCount":2,"layoutName",....}

My idea is to create a variable 'predOutput' and assign its values from AI model.
Then the number of page will be equal to:
split(split(variables('predOutput'),',"layoutName"')[0],'pageCount":')[1]

Best,

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