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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-19T09:07:10+00:00

I have a huge string of text that is apparently raw data for a

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I have a huge string of text that is apparently raw data for a PDF file, and I need to make it back into a PDF.

Currently I’m reading the string into a StringBuffer but if I need to I can change that. From there I have tried just writing it out to a file and changing the extension (I really hoped that worked, but I kinda knew it wouldn’t), I’ve tried taking it to a String then getting a byte[] out of it and writing that to the file or using a DataOutputStream to put the bytes into the file. None of these has seemed to work.

I’ve also tried using the iText plugin, I tried just writing it to a pdf through that and I also tried reading the text as a pdf and then copying it page by page to a new pdf. Neither of these have returned very good results.

It’s Friday afternoon, I’m tapped, any suggestions will be a huge help!

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Okay, well after a lot of research I found out that to preserve the binary data in the string that typically you convert it to Base64 encoding. On a complete guess I decoded the string out of Base64 and dropped the bytes into the pdf file, and lo and behold I had a pdf that could be opened!

    Thanks for the answers and I hope this helps someone in the future!

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