How can I determine if a file is a PDF file?

Question

Here is what I use into my NUnit tests, that must validate against multiple versions of PDF generated using Crystal Reports:

public static void CheckIsPDF(byte[] data)
    {
        Assert.IsNotNull(data);
        Assert.Greater(data.Length,4);

        // header 
        Assert.AreEqual(data[0],0x25); // %
        Assert.AreEqual(data[1],0x50); // P
        Assert.AreEqual(data[2],0x44); // D
        Assert.AreEqual(data[3],0x46); // F
        Assert.AreEqual(data[4],0x2D); // -

        if(data[5]==0x31 && data[6]==0x2E && data[7]==0x33) // version is 1.3 ?
        {                  
            // file terminator
            Assert.AreEqual(data[data.Length-7],0x25); // %
            Assert.AreEqual(data[data.Length-6],0x25); // %
            Assert.AreEqual(data[data.Length-5],0x45); // E
            Assert.AreEqual(data[data.Length-4],0x4F); // O
            Assert.AreEqual(data[data.Length-3],0x46); // F
            Assert.AreEqual(data[data.Length-2],0x20); // SPACE
            Assert.AreEqual(data[data.Length-1],0x0A); // EOL
            return;
        }

        if(data[5]==0x31 && data[6]==0x2E && data[7]==0x34) // version is 1.4 ?
        {
            // file terminator
            Assert.AreEqual(data[data.Length-6],0x25); // %
            Assert.AreEqual(data[data.Length-5],0x25); // %
            Assert.AreEqual(data[data.Length-4],0x45); // E
            Assert.AreEqual(data[data.Length-3],0x4F); // O
            Assert.AreEqual(data[data.Length-2],0x46); // F
            Assert.AreEqual(data[data.Length-1],0x0A); // EOL
            return;
        }

        Assert.Fail("Unsupported file format");
    }

you can find out the mime type of a file (or byte array), so you dont dumbly rely on the extension. I do it with aperture's MimeExtractor (http://aperture.sourceforge.net/) or I saw some days ago a library just for that (http://sourceforge.net/projects/mime-util)

I use aperture to extract text from a variety of files, not only pdf, but have to tweak thinks for pdfs for example (aperture uses pdfbox, but i added another library as fallback when pdfbox fails)

Since you use PDFBox you can simply do:

PDDocument.load(file);

It'll fail with an Exception if the PDF is corrupted etc.

If it succeeds you can also check if the PDF is encrypted using .isEncrypted()

Here an adapted Java version of NinjaCross's code.

/**
 * Test if the data in the given byte array represents a PDF file.
 */
public static boolean is_pdf(byte[] data) {
    if (data != null && data.length > 4 &&
            data[0] == 0x25 && // %
            data[1] == 0x50 && // P
            data[2] == 0x44 && // D
            data[3] == 0x46 && // F
            data[4] == 0x2D) { // -

        // version 1.3 file terminator
        if (data[5] == 0x31 && data[6] == 0x2E && data[7] == 0x33 &&
                data[data.length - 7] == 0x25 && // %
                data[data.length - 6] == 0x25 && // %
                data[data.length - 5] == 0x45 && // E
                data[data.length - 4] == 0x4F && // O
                data[data.length - 3] == 0x46 && // F
                data[data.length - 2] == 0x20 && // SPACE
                data[data.length - 1] == 0x0A) { // EOL
            return true;
        }

        // version 1.3 file terminator
        if (data[5] == 0x31 && data[6] == 0x2E && data[7] == 0x34 &&
                data[data.length - 6] == 0x25 && // %
                data[data.length - 5] == 0x25 && // %
                data[data.length - 4] == 0x45 && // E
                data[data.length - 3] == 0x4F && // O
                data[data.length - 2] == 0x46 && // F
                data[data.length - 1] == 0x0A) { // EOL
            return true;
        }
    }
    return false;
}

And some simple unit tests:

@Test
public void test_valid_pdf_1_3_data_is_pdf() {
    assertTrue(is_pdf("%PDF-1.3 CONTENT %%EOF \n".getBytes()));
}

@Test
public void test_valid_pdf_1_4_data_is_pdf() {
    assertTrue(is_pdf("%PDF-1.4 CONTENT %%EOF\n".getBytes()));
}

@Test
public void test_invalid_data_is_not_pdf() {
    assertFalse(is_pdf("Hello World".getBytes()));
}

If you come up with any failing unit tests, please let me know.

I was using some of the suggestions I found here and on other sites/posts for determining whether a pdf was valid or not. I purposely corrupted a pdf file, and unfortunately, many of the solutions did not detect that the file was corrupted.

Eventually, after tinkering around with different methods in the API, I tried this:

PDDocument.load(file).getPage(0).getContents().toString();

This did not throw an exception, but it did output this:

 WARN  [COSParser:1154] The end of the stream doesn't point to the correct offset, using workaround to read the stream, stream start position: 171, length: 1145844, expected end position: 1146015

Personally, I wanted an exception to be thrown if the file was corrupted so I could handle it myself, but it appeared that the API I was implementing already handled them in their own way.

To get around this, I decided to try parsing the files using the class that gave the warm statement (COSParser). I found that there was a subclass, called PDFParser, which inherited a method called "setLenient", which was the key (https://pdfbox.apache.org/docs/2.0.4/javadocs/org/apache/pdfbox/pdfparser/COSParser.html).

I then implemented the following:

        RandomAccessFile accessFile = new RandomAccessFile(file, "r");
        PDFParser parser = new PDFParser(accessFile); 
        parser.setLenient(false);
        parser.parse();

This threw an Exception for my corrupted file, as I wanted. Hope this helps someone out!

Pdf files begin "%PDF" (open one in TextPad or similar and take a look)

Any reason you can't just read the file with a StringReader and check for this?