If you don't want to use the xmlrpclib's Binary class, you can just use the .encode() method of strings:

a = open("pdf_reference.pdf", "rb").read().encode("base64")

pypdf does not implement any rendering functionality, thus you cannot apply it to your use-case here. The output you get is the internal representation of the PDF page used by pypdf.

If you just want to display the PDF file inside the web browser, I would probably go with the pdf.js library which does all the rendering on the frontend side.

If you really need image-based output, there are lots of libraries/tools which you could use:

• pdf2image, which is based upon the poppler library
• (Py)MuPDF
• Ghostscript
• pypdfium2
• pyvips
• ...

An example for pdf2image to get the first page as JPG data could look like this:

import base64
from io import BytesIO

import pdf2image


images = pdf2image.convert_from_path('file.pdf', first_page=1, last_page=1, fmt='jpg', use_pdftocairo=True)
image = images[0]
image_buffer = BytesIO()
image.save(image_buffer, format='JPEG')
image_data = base64.b64encode(image_buffer.getvalue())

For further options, like the resolution to use for rendering etc., see the corresponding upstream documentation.

From my understanding base64decode only takes in a base64 string and looks like you have some headers on your string that are not encoded.

I would remove "data:application/pdf;base64,"

check out the doc here: https://docs.python.org/2/library/base64.html

When I've used it in the past, I have only used the encoded string.