Downloading data from website that requires credentials for access

[emcee825]

Hello,

I've tried looking around for quite a bit to piece together whether this question had already been asked (and answered) on SAS Communities or to see if there were any appropriate articles written and have been getting frustrated with it. Please excuse any redundancy or ignorance with the following question and if this is being asked in the wrong subcommunity.

I'm trying to develop some code where I can run it and have it download data from a data warehouse via a website that requires my login credentials for access. My gut tells me that this shouldn't be a complicated process. I've seen a lot of things about CURL in articles that I've read-- is this something that should be used for this situation? What proc would be used for something like this?

Thank you, really appreciate any guidance on this!

[ChrisHemedinger]

Hi, I suggest trying PROC HTTP.  It supports Basic Authentication (user ID and password) with the WEBUSERNAME and WEBPASSWORD options, and you can use it to download content from a web site.  I have some examples of using PROC HTTP here, although my examples don't show the authentication bit.

Chris

[emcee825]

Thanks, Chris! This is the clearest direction I've received thus far, even with looking on my own.

One more question for you, then, if that's ok: not only do I need to give authentication, I also need to specify some criteria upon which to pull the data. Would I go through all these steps then copy and paste the URL that's in the browser into the "url" bit in PROC HTTP? I apologize if these questions seem a bit elementary!