itextsharp - Invalidpdfexception pdf header signature not found

Question

I have some code that reads pdf files. The code fails at the line :

iTextSharp.text.pdf.PRTokeniser.CheckPdfHeader() at
                                 iTextSharp.text.pdf.PdfReader.ReadPdf()

I know from other entries that this issue is coming from some invalid formatting in the pdf. However I'm not in a position to tell my users to redo their pdfs. Is there some other way around this issue, that can allow reading of the pdf despite this problem?

Answer 1

If a file doesn't start with %PDF- then there's nothing to fix: the file isn't a PDF file.

However, there may be another problem: maybe you're trying to access a file that has zero length due to some problem while creating the InputStream. Another context in which I've seen this happen, is a PDF loaded from a server, where the server returned a 404 message in HTML instead of a PDF file ;-)

Whenever that exception happens, you should store the bytes somewhere, and examine them. Without those bytes, nobody will be able to give you useful advice.