replace
Regex replacement on page content streams
Usage
pdftl
<input>replace[<spec>...]output<output>
Details
The replace operation performs replacement of parts of
page content streams, based on regular expressions. in the
PDF file. Page ranges can be specified. The default page
range is all pages. The <spec> specification is:
[optional page range]/<from>/<to>/[count]
where <from> and <to> are strings describing regular
expressions, as described at
https://docs.python.org/3/library/re.html.
The delimiter / can be replaced with any other non-alphnumeric
character. It must break the <spec> into exactly 4 parts (where the
first may be empty). The delimiter is defined as the final character
of <spec>, ignoring digits.
Any trailing digits are interpreted as count, which is the
maximum number of times the expression will be matched for
each page content stream.
Before and after the replacement is applied, the page
content stream is normalized (see the normalize operation), which
results in it appearing with one operator per line.
By default, the replacement also recurses into Form XObjects referenced
by the page. Pass recurse=false to restrict replacement to the
top-level page content stream only.
See also the dump_streams operation, which lets you examine normalized content
streams so you can formulate a regular expression to use with replace.
Examples
Replace red with blue on pages 1-3
pdftl in.pdf replace '1-3/1 0 0 (RG|rg)/0 0 1 \1/' output out.pdf
Replace foo with bar on all pages, skipping Form XObjects
pdftl in.pdf replace recurse=false '/foo/bar/' output out.pdf
Tags: in_place, content_stream, dangerous
Source: pdftl.operations.replace
Read online: https://pdftl.readthedocs.io/en/latest/operations/replace.html
Type: Operation