Search words within folders

[Emma2021]

I have a windows folder that has many sub folders and within those sub folders many pdf files. I would like to search a key word within all those pdf files contents. Can I use sas ? Except Windows built-in search.

[ballardw]

To use the SAS text search tools in basic SAS you would first need to convert every file to a SAS data set prior to searching and PDF is not a "nice" data format, likely meaning not practical.

I am not sure whether the SAS Text Miner, if you have access to that, might have more luck.

A secondary issue with PDF files is that the characters are not exactly stored as the letters you expect to make up the key word you may want to search for. 

[SASKiwi]

If you have Adobe Acrobat, it provides this capability: https://helpx.adobe.com/nz/acrobat/using/searching-pdfs.html

A Google search will find other tools and techniques.

SAS really isn't a good option for searching documents for key words unless you are doing analytics.

[Emma2021]

I don’t want to open each pdf to search the word. I thought SAS has a tool

[AhmedAl_Attar]

Hi @Emma2021 ,

You may want to invest in a Search Indexing Tool for your Windows Documents. These tools are purpose built, and they probably do their job much better than custom SAS hand coding.

Here is a example of such tool: https://docfetcher.sourceforge.io/en/index.html (Disclaimer: I've never used this before, but long time ago, I've used a similar indexing tool for searching through my saved docs) 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desktop_search

https://sourceforge.net/software/desktop-search/

Hope this helps,

Ahmed

[Patrick]

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@Emma2021 wrote:
I don’t want to open each pdf to search the word. I thought SAS has a tool

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To search for words in a .pdf you need to open it and scan the text whether you code that now explicitly yourself or some "tool" does it for you in the background.

SAS Text Miner/Text Analytics allows for .pdf sources. If you've got that licensed then look into it. 

If not then using SAS you would need to create a directory listing for all .pdf (path and name), call a 3rd party tool like tika to convert the .pdf to text and then use SAS to search through the text for specific terms.

[SASKiwi]

You don't have to. That link I posted describes how you can catalog multiple PDFs to search all of them at the same time.

[FreelanceReinh]

Hi @Emma2021,

@SASKiwi wrote:

If you have Adobe Acrobat, it provides this capability: https://helpx.adobe.com/nz/acrobat/using/searching-pdfs.html

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Note that this capability is also available in the free Acrobat Reader, i.e., you don't need the paid Acrobat Pro software. Just open the "Advanced Search" dialog with Ctrl-Shift-F and you'll see the option to select a folder. The search will automatically include all subfolders of the selected folder.