Pdfmerger updated for python3 usage

README.md

This was originally taken from https://superuser.com/a/1012669/894282 and then updated to be compatible with python 3.X

Requires pypdf2 to be installed.

pdfmerger.py

#! /usr/bin/env python
# Original author Nicholas Kim, modified by Yan Pashkovsky
# New license - GPL v3
import sys
import time
from PyPDF2 import PdfReader, PdfWriter
try:
    from PyPDF2.utils import PdfReadError
except ImportError:
    from PyPDF2._reader import PdfReadError

def eprint(*args, **kwargs):
    """Print to stderr

    Taken from https://stackoverflow.com/a/14981125/7564988
    """
    print(*args, file=sys.stderr, **kwargs)

def get_cmdline_arguments():
    """Retrieve command line arguments."""

    from optparse import OptionParser

    usage_string = "%prog [-o output_name] file1, file2 [, ...]"

    parser = OptionParser(usage_string)
    parser.add_option(
        "-o", "--output",
        dest="output_filename",
        default=time.strftime("output_%Y%m%d_%H%M%S"),
        help="specify output filename (exclude .pdf extension); default is current date/time stamp"
    )

    options, args = parser.parse_args()
    if len(args) < 2:
        parser.print_help()
        sys.exit(1)
    return options, args

def main():
    options, filenames = get_cmdline_arguments()
    output_pdf_name = options.output_filename + ".pdf"
    files_to_merge = []

    # get PDF files
    for f in filenames:
        try:
            next_pdf_file = PdfReader(open(f, "rb"))
        except(PdfReadError):
            eprint("%s is not a valid PDF file." % f)
            sys.exit(1)
        except(IOError):
            eprint("%s could not be found." % f)
            sys.exit(1)
        else:
            files_to_merge.append(next_pdf_file)

    # merge page by page
    output_pdf_stream = PdfWriter()
    j=0
    k=0
    for f in files_to_merge:
        for i in range(len(f.pages)):
            output_pdf_stream.add_page(f.pages[i])
            if i==0:
                output_pdf_stream.add_outline_item(str(filenames[k]),j)
            j = j + 1
        k += 1

    # create output pdf file
    try:
        output_pdf_file = open(output_pdf_name, "wb")
        output_pdf_stream.write(output_pdf_file)
    finally:
        output_pdf_file.close()

    print("%s successfully created." % output_pdf_name)


if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

Latest revision works with PyPDF2 version 3.0.1.

NOTE PyPDF2 is deprecated in favor of pypdf, which actually gets regular updates. This still works for now, so I'm not going to fix what isn't broken.

Compatibility with mainline pypdf is as simple as replacing PyPDF2 with pypdf in the import statements; everything else should work.