How to delete attachment of PDF using itext

Question

I am new to pdf and i use the following code to embed the file to pdf. However, I want to write another program to delete the embeded files. May I know how can I do it? Really Thanks!

public void addAttachments(String src, String dest, String[] attachments) throws IOException,DocumentException {
PdfReader reader = new PdfReader(src);
PdfStamper stamper = new PdfStamper(reader, new FileOutputStream(dest));
for (int i = 0; i < attachments.length; i++) {
        addAttachment(stamper.getWriter(), new File(attachments[i]));
                                  }
                                  stamper.close();
                                }

                                protected void addAttachment(PdfWriter writer, File src) throws IOException {
                                  PdfFileSpecification fs =
                                    PdfFileSpecification.fileEmbedded(writer, src.getAbsolutePath(), src.getName(), null);
                                  writer.addFileAttachment(src.getName().substring(0, src.getName().indexOf('.')), fs);
                                }

Answer 1

Let me start by rewriting your code to add an embedded file.

public void manipulatePdf(String src, String dest) throws IOException, DocumentException {
    PdfReader reader = new PdfReader(src);
    PdfStamper stamper = new PdfStamper(reader, new FileOutputStream(dest));
    PdfFileSpecification fs = PdfFileSpecification.fileEmbedded(
            stamper.getWriter(), null, "test.txt", "Some test".getBytes());
    stamper.addFileAttachment("some test file", fs);
    stamper.close();
}

You can find the full code sample here: AddEmbeddedFile

Now when we look at the Attachments panel of the resulting PDF, we see an attachment test.txt with description "some test file":

After you have added this file, you now want to remove it. To do this, please use RUPS and take a look inside:

This gives us a hint on where to find the embedded file. Take a look at the code of the RemoveEmbeddedFile example to see how we navigate through the object-oriented file format that PDF is:

public void manipulatePdf(String src, String dest) throws IOException, DocumentException {
    PdfReader reader = new PdfReader(src);
    PdfDictionary root = reader.getCatalog();
    PdfDictionary names = root.getAsDict(PdfName.NAMES);
    PdfDictionary embeddedFiles = names.getAsDict(PdfName.EMBEDDEDFILES);
    PdfArray namesArray = embeddedFiles.getAsArray(PdfName.NAMES);
    namesArray.remove(0);
    namesArray.remove(0);
    PdfStamper stamper = new PdfStamper(reader, new FileOutputStream(dest));
    stamper.close();
}

As you can see, we start at the root of the document (aka the catalog) and we walk via Names and EmbeddedFiles to the Names array. As I know that the embedded file I want to remove is the first in the array, I remove the name and value by removing the element with index 0 twice. This first removes the description, then the reference to the file. The attachment is now gone:

As there was only one embedded file in my example, I now see an empty array when I look inside the PDF:

If you want to remove all the embedded files at once, the code is even easier. That is shown in the RemoveEmbeddedFiles example:

public void manipulatePdf(String src, String dest) throws IOException, DocumentException {
    PdfReader reader = new PdfReader(src);
    PdfDictionary root = reader.getCatalog();
    PdfDictionary names = root.getAsDict(PdfName.NAMES);
    names.remove(PdfName.EMBEDDEDFILES);
    PdfStamper stamper = new PdfStamper(reader, new FileOutputStream(dest));
    stamper.close();
}

Now we don't even look at the entries of the EmbeddedFiles dictionary. There is no longer such an entry in the Names dictionary: