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copied!<h2>A simple command line executable called: <em>pdfinfo</em>.</h2> <p>It is <a href="http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/download.html">downloadable for Linux and Windows</a>. You download a compressed file containing several little PDF-related programs. Extract it somewhere.</p> <p>One of those files is <strong>pdfinfo</strong> (or <strong>pdfinfo.exe</strong> for Windows). An example of data returned by running it on a PDF document:</p> <pre class="lang-none prettyprint-override"><code>Title: test1.pdf Author: John Smith Creator: PScript5.dll Version 5.2.2 Producer: Acrobat Distiller 9.2.0 (Windows) CreationDate: 01/09/13 19:46:57 ModDate: 01/09/13 19:46:57 Tagged: yes Form: none Pages: 13 <-- This is what we need Encrypted: no Page size: 2384 x 3370 pts (A0) File size: 17569259 bytes Optimized: yes PDF version: 1.6 </code></pre> <p>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.</p> <p>There is an easy way of extracting the pagecount from the output, here in PHP:</p> <pre class="lang-php prettyprint-override"><code>// 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 function echo getPDFPages("test 1.pdf"); // Output: 13 </code></pre> <p>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.</p> <p><strong>I know its not pure PHP</strong>, but external programs are <em>way</em> better in PDF handling (as seen in the question).</p> <p>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.</p>

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