Question

I am looking for ways to read in a PDF file with SAS. Apparently this is not basic functionality and there is very little to be found on the internet. (Let alone that google is not easy with PDF in you search giving you also links to PDF documents that go about other things.)

The only things that can be found, are people looking for ways to import data into datasets from a PDF. For me, that is not even necesarry. I would like to be able to read the contents of the PDF file in one big character variable. If possible, it would even be better to be able to read in the file’s binary data.

Is this possible with SAS and how? (I got it to work in Access VBA, but can’t find any similar ways in SAS.)

(In the end, the purpose is to convert this to base64 and put that base64-string into an XML document.)

Answer 1

You probably will not be able to read the entire file into one character variable since the maximum size of a character variable is around 33 KB. A simple way to read in one line at a time, though, is something like the following:

%let pdfFileName = Test.pdf;
%let lineSize = 2000;

data base;
   format text_line $&lineSize..;
   infile "&pdfFileName" lrecl=&lineSize;
   input text_line $;
run;

This requires that you have a general idea of the maximum record length ahead of time, but you could write additional code to determine the maximum record size prior to reading in the file. In this example each line of text is read into one character variable named “text_line.” From there, you could use a RETAIN statement or double trailers (@@) in the INPUT line to process multiple lines at a time. The SAS web-site has plenty of documentation on how to read and process text from various types of input files.