Perl Requires Chilkat v11.7.0+

What PDF Text Replacement Does Not Change: Metadata, Links, Form Fields

See more PDF Text Replacement Examples

TextReplace changes the page content only. A placeholder that also appears in the document's metadata (the Title, Author, Subject, Keywords, Creator or Producer), in a link's target URL, or in a form field's value is left as it is and reported in "notReplaced" with "where" saying which. The invoice template's title is "Invoice for {{customer}}" and its "View this invoice online" link points at a URL that holds {{customer}}. Chilkat2 Perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use Chilkat2;

# This example requires the Chilkat API to have been previously unlocked.
# See Global Unlock Sample for sample code.

# The PDF used in this example is available at invoice_template.pdf

my $pdf = Chilkat2::Pdf->new;
my $success = $pdf->LoadFile('qa_data/pdf/invoice_template.pdf');
if (!$success) {
    print $pdf->LastErrorText, "\n";
    exit;
}

my $json = Chilkat2::JsonObject->new;
$json->UpdateString('placeholders.customer', 'Acme Corp');
# (The other placeholders are left as they are for this example.)
$json->UpdateString('unusedPlaceholders', 'keep');

my $jsonOut = Chilkat2::JsonObject->new;
$success = $pdf->TextReplace('apply', $json, $jsonOut);
if (!$success) {
    print $pdf->LastErrorText, "\n";
    exit;
}

print 'In the page content, customer was replaced ', $jsonOut->IntOf('replacements[0].count'), " times.\n";

# Where else the placeholder occurs, untouched:
my $i = 0;
my $count_i = $jsonOut->SizeOfArray('notReplaced');
while ($i < $count_i) {
    $jsonOut->I($i);
    print 'not replaced: {{', $jsonOut->StringOf('notReplaced[i].field'), '}} in ', $jsonOut->StringOf('notReplaced[i].where'), "\n";
    $i = $i + 1;
}

$success = $pdf->WriteFile('qa_output/invoice_customer.pdf');
if (!$success) {
    print $pdf->LastErrorText, "\n";
    exit;
}

# Sample output:

# In the page content, customer was replaced 2 times.
# not replaced: {{customer}} in metadata
# not replaced: {{customer}} in linkTarget