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Unstructured

The unstructured package from Unstructured.IO extracts clean text from raw source documents like PDFs and Word documents. This page covers how to use the unstructured ecosystem within LangChain.

Installation and Setup​

If you are using a loader that runs locally, use the following steps to get unstructured and its dependencies running locally.

  • Install the Python SDK with pip install unstructured.
    • You can install document specific dependencies with extras, i.e. pip install "unstructured[docx]".
    • To install the dependencies for all document types, use pip install "unstructured[all-docs]".
  • Install the following system dependencies if they are not already available on your system. Depending on what document types you're parsing, you may not need all of these.
    • libmagic-dev (filetype detection)
    • poppler-utils (images and PDFs)
    • tesseract-ocr(images and PDFs)
    • libreoffice (MS Office docs)
    • pandoc (EPUBs)

If you want to get up and running with less set up, you can simply run pip install unstructured and use UnstructuredAPIFileLoader or UnstructuredAPIFileIOLoader. That will process your document using the hosted Unstructured API.

The Unstructured API requires API keys to make requests. You can generate a free API key here and start using it today! Checkout the README here here to get started making API calls. We'd love to hear your feedback, let us know how it goes in our community slack. And stay tuned for improvements to both quality and performance! Check out the instructions here if you'd like to self-host the Unstructured API or run it locally.

Wrappers​

Data Loaders​

The primary unstructured wrappers within langchain are data loaders. The following shows how to use the most basic unstructured data loader. There are other file-specific data loaders available in the langchain_community.document_loaders module.

from langchain_community.document_loaders import UnstructuredFileLoader

loader = UnstructuredFileLoader("state_of_the_union.txt")
loader.load()

If you instantiate the loader with UnstructuredFileLoader(mode="elements"), the loader will track additional metadata like the page number and text type (i.e. title, narrative text) when that information is available.