Iterate Over Dictionary to Combine PDFs, Rename

Question

I am attempting to create a function that combines pdf files into a single file. I am attempting to take a dictionary that is constructed as follows:

mydict = {"001 Pre-Op - Production Run Form - Shift-1-C.pdf":
            ['001 Pre-Op - Production Run Form - Shift-1-1.pdf',
            '001 Pre-Op - Production Run Form - Shift-1-2.pdf'],
            "001 Pre-Op - Production Run Form - Shift-2-C.pdf":
            ['001 Pre-Op - Production Run Form - Shift-2-1.pdf',
            '001 Pre-Op - Production Run Form - Shift-2-2.pdf']}

I would like to create a new pdf with the key name (ie "001 Pre-Op - Production Run Form - Shift-1-C.pdf") that's created by combing the two values (['001 Pre-Op - Production Run Form - Shift-1-1.pdf','001 Pre-Op - Production Run Form - Shift-1-2.pdf']) for each key. I am currently using this code to combine the values, rename as key name, & delete the "values" that were PDFs:

from PyPDF2 import PdfFileWriter, PdfFileReader, PdfFileMerger, PdfFileReader
import pathlib
import shutil
import datetime
import os

merger = PdfFileMerger()

pdfs1 = ['001 Pre-Op - Production Run Form - Shift-1-1.pdf',
            '001 Pre-Op - Production Run Form - Shift-1-2.pdf']
try:
    for pdf in pdfs1:
        merger.append(pdf)
    merger.write("001 Pre-Op - Production Run Form - Shift-1-C.pdf")
    if os.path.exists("001 Pre-Op - Production Run Form - Shift-1-C.pdf"):
        [os.remove(f) for f in pdfs1]
    else:
        pass
except Exception:
    pass

pdfs2 = ['001 Pre-Op - Production Run Form - Shift-2-1.pdf',
            '001 Pre-Op - Production Run Form - Shift-2-2.pdf']
try:
    for pdf in pdfs2:
        merger.append(pdf)
    merger.write("001 Pre-Op - Production Run Form - Shift-2-C.pdf")
    if os.path.exists("001 Pre-Op - Production Run Form - Shift-2-C.pdf"):
        [os.remove(f) for f in pdfs2]
    else:
        pass
except Exception:
    pass

You can see this is a very manual process to combine the PDFs & delete the original PDFs if they were able to be combined. This makes it very error prone as it's manual. My real dictionary has 100+ keys/values to look up across.

I am looking for a more pythonic solution that allows me to combine, name, & remove PDFs with dictionary. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

I've tried the below loop but nothing happens:

for k,v in mydict.items():
    try:
        for pdf in v:
            print(pdf)
            merger.append(pdf)
    except Exception:
        pass

Answer 1

The problem is not with the algorithm.

I don't use this package myself, but what I noticed is that you don't use the

with # (requires the magic method __enter__ in PdfFileMerger) 

statement to create the file and close it automatically, nor the PdfFileMerger.close() method after writing.

Try the following code:

for k, v in mydict.items():
    try:
        merger = PdfFileMerger()
        for pdf in v:
            print(pdf)
            merger.append(pdf)
        merger.write(k)
        merger.close()
        if os.path.exists(k):
            print(1)
    except Exception:
        pass