How to get the permissions of a pdf document

[vrrashkov]

Probably I am missing it, but I cannot find how to retrieve the permissions of a PDF document, the only option that I see in the documentation is decode_permissions but this only returns the permission from the argument that I provide it with.

Is there something that will return me all the permissions or a way to get the "permissions_code" so I can pass it to the decode_permissions of the current document that I have loaded?

[stefan6419846]

Update: Starting at version 4.0.0, you can now use reader.user_access_permissions directly.

---

Old answer

Skimming through the code, there has never been a clean API for this.

reader._encryption.values.Perms holds the permission handlers (PDF 1.7, section 8.7.3).

According to the PDF docs, the P key of the encryption dictionary holds the corresponding flags. You can access the flags dictionary by this with reader.decode_permissions(reader._encryption.P). Please note that this is an internal attribute, thus this code might break in the future.

[vrrashkov]

Thank you for the descriptive answer, It's a bit strange that this is not cleanly provided from the API. The answer you have me is exactly what I need, even if it changes in the future it won't be a problem to update on my end.

[stefan6419846]

As a heads-up: For pypdf 4.0.0, decode_permissions has been deprecated in favor of user_access_permissions to provide a clean API. To get some similar output as before, you probably want to use reader.user_access_permissions.to_dict() to get a dictionary-based representation of the corresponding flags.