Get the number of pages in a PDF document

A simple command line executable called: pdfinfo.

It is downloadable for Linux and Windows. You download a compressed file containing several little PDF-related programs. Extract it somewhere.

One of those files is pdfinfo (or pdfinfo.exe for Windows). An example of data returned by running it on a PDF document:

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

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.

There is an easy way of extracting the pagecount from the output, here in PHP:

// 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

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.

I know its not pure PHP, but external programs are way better in PDF handling (as seen in the question).

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.

Security Notice: Use escapeshellarg on $document if document name is being fed from user input or file uploads.

You can use qpdf like below. If a file file_name.pdf has 100 pages,

$ qpdf --show-npages file_name.pdf
100

Simplest of all is using ImageMagick

here is a sample code

$image = new Imagick();
$image->pingImage('myPdfFile.pdf');
echo $image->getNumberImages();

otherwise you can also use PDF libraries like MPDF or TCPDF for PHP

Here is a simple example to get the number of pages in PDF with PHP.

<?php

function count_pdf_pages($pdfname) {
  $pdftext = file_get_contents($pdfname);
  $num = preg_match_all("/\/Page\W/", $pdftext, $dummy);

  return $num;
}

$pdfname = 'example.pdf'; // Put your PDF path
$pages = count_pdf_pages($pdfname);

echo $pages;

?>