Microsoft Graph API PDF Document Content

Hello admin-blechinger,

I understand you are trying to get content of a PDF file from SharePoint using Microsoft Graph API, but your request fails while DOCX files work.

The reason is that PDF files are returned as a binary stream from the Graph API /content endpoint. To handle PDFs, you need to download the binary content first and then extract text using external libraries.

I have one pdf file with below sample content in it:

I uploaded this pdf file to SharePoint folder in this path:

You can run below API calls in Graph Explorer to get the values of site ID and drive ID respectively:

Site ID:

GET https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/sites/root:/sites/siteName

Drive ID:

GET https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/sites/siteIDfromAbove/drives?$filter=name eq 'driveName'

In my case, I used client credentials flow for getting token and granted Files.Read.All permission of Application type:

Now, I used the Python code below to get an access token, download the PDF from SharePoint, and extract content using PyPDF2:

import msal
import requests
#pip install PyPDF2
from PyPDF2 import PdfReader

TENANT_ID = "tenantId"
CLIENT_ID = "appId"
CLIENT_SECRET = "secret"

SITE_ID = "siteId"
DRIVE_ID = "driveId"
FILE_PATH = "/DemoFolder/demo.pdf"

authority = f"https://login.microsoftonline.com/{TENANT_ID}"
scope = ["https://graph.microsoft.com/.default"]

app = msal.ConfidentialClientApplication(
    client_id=CLIENT_ID,
    client_credential=CLIENT_SECRET,
    authority=authority
)

result = app.acquire_token_silent(scope, account=None)
if not result:
    result = app.acquire_token_for_client(scopes=scope)

access_token = result.get("access_token")
if not access_token:
    raise Exception("Failed to acquire access token")

content_url = f"https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/sites/{SITE_ID}/drives/{DRIVE_ID}/root:{FILE_PATH}:/content"
headers = {"Authorization": f"Bearer {access_token}"}

response = requests.get(content_url, headers=headers)

if response.status_code == 200:
    pdf_file = "demo_downloaded.pdf"
    with open(pdf_file, "wb") as f:
        f.write(response.content)
    print(f"PDF downloaded successfully: {pdf_file}")
else:
    raise Exception(f"Failed to download PDF: {response.status_code}")

reader = PdfReader(pdf_file)
print("\n--- Extracted Text from PDF ---")
for page_num, page in enumerate(reader.pages, start=1):
    text = page.extract_text()
    if text:
        print(f"\n--- Page {page_num} ---\n{text.strip()}")
    else:
        print(f"\n--- Page {page_num} ---\n(No text found)")

Hope this helps! Let me know if you need more help. Happy to assist.

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If you have any other questions or are still experiencing issues, feel free to ask in the "comments" section, and I'd be happy to help.