Extract and Save an Attachment

Get All Attachments

With Aspose.PDF, it is possible to get all attachments from a PDF document. This is useful either when you want to save the documents separately from the PDF, or if you need to strip a PDF of attachments.

To get all attachments from a PDF file:

  1. Loop through the Document object’s EmbeddedFiles collection. The EmbeddedFiles collection contains all attachments. Each element of this collection represents a FileSpecification object. Each iteration of the foreach loop through the EmbeddedFiles collection returns a FileSpecification object.
  2. Once the object is available, retrieve either all the attached file’s properties or the file itself.

The following code snippets show how to get all the attachments from a PDF document.

The following code snippet also work with Aspose.PDF.Drawing library.

// For complete examples and data files, please go to https://github.com/aspose-pdf/Aspose.PDF-for-.NET
// The path to the documents directory.
string dataDir = RunExamples.GetDataDir_AsposePdf_Attachments();

// Open document
Document pdfDocument = new Document(dataDir + "GetAlltheAttachments.pdf");

// Get embedded files collection
EmbeddedFileCollection embeddedFiles = pdfDocument.EmbeddedFiles;

// Get count of the embedded files
Console.WriteLine("Total files : {0}", embeddedFiles.Count);

int count = 1;

// Loop through the collection to get all the attachments
foreach (FileSpecification fileSpecification in embeddedFiles)
{
    Console.WriteLine("Name: {0}", fileSpecification.Name);
    Console.WriteLine("Description: {0}",
    fileSpecification.Description);
    Console.WriteLine("Mime Type: {0}", fileSpecification.MIMEType);

    // Check if parameter object contains the parameters
    if (fileSpecification.Params != null)
    {
        Console.WriteLine("CheckSum: {0}",
        fileSpecification.Params.CheckSum);
        Console.WriteLine("Creation Date: {0}",
        fileSpecification.Params.CreationDate);
        Console.WriteLine("Modification Date: {0}",
        fileSpecification.Params.ModDate);
        Console.WriteLine("Size: {0}", fileSpecification.Params.Size);
    }

    // Get the attachment and write to file or stream
    byte[] fileContent = new byte[fileSpecification.Contents.Length];
    fileSpecification.Contents.Read(fileContent, 0,
    fileContent.Length);
    FileStream fileStream = new FileStream(dataDir + count + "_out" + ".txt",
    FileMode.Create);
    fileStream.Write(fileContent, 0, fileContent.Length);
    fileStream.Close();
    count+=1;
}

Get Individual Attachment

In order to get an individual attachment, we can specify the index of attachment in EmbeddedFiles object of Document instance. Please try using following code snippet.

// For complete examples and data files, please go to https://github.com/aspose-pdf/Aspose.PDF-for-.NET
// The path to the documents directory.
string dataDir = RunExamples.GetDataDir_AsposePdf_Attachments();

// Open document
Document pdfDocument = new Document(dataDir + "GetIndividualAttachment.pdf");

// Get particular embedded file
FileSpecification fileSpecification = pdfDocument.EmbeddedFiles[1];

// Get the file properties
Console.WriteLine("Name: {0}", fileSpecification.Name);
Console.WriteLine("Description: {0}", fileSpecification.Description);
Console.WriteLine("Mime Type: {0}", fileSpecification.MIMEType);

// Check if parameter object contains the parameters
if (fileSpecification.Params != null)
{
    Console.WriteLine("CheckSum: {0}",
    fileSpecification.Params.CheckSum);
    Console.WriteLine("Creation Date: {0}",
    fileSpecification.Params.CreationDate);
    Console.WriteLine("Modification Date: {0}",
    fileSpecification.Params.ModDate);
    Console.WriteLine("Size: {0}", fileSpecification.Params.Size);
}


// Get the attachment and write to file or stream
byte[] fileContent = new byte[fileSpecification.Contents.Length];
fileSpecification.Contents.Read(fileContent, 0, fileContent.Length);

FileStream fileStream = new FileStream(dataDir + "test_out" + ".txt", FileMode.Create);
fileStream.Write(fileContent, 0, fileContent.Length);
fileStream.Close();