The Unstructured Platform Partition Endpoint, part of the Unstructured Platform API, is intended for rapid prototyping of Unstructured’s various partitioning strategies, with limited support for chunking. It is designed to work only with processing of local files, one file at a time. Use the Unstructured Platform Workflow Endpoint for production-level scenarios, file processing in batches, files and data in remote locations, generating embeddings, applying post-transform enrichments, using the latest and highest-performing models, and for the highest quality results at the lowest cost.

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Get started

To call the Unstructured Platform Partition Endpoint, you need an Unstructured account and an Unstructured API key:

1

Sign up

To sign up for an Unstructured account, go to the For Developers page and choose one of the following plans:

If you’re not sure which plan to sign up for, start with a pay-per-page plan. You can always switch plans later.

If you choose a pay-per-page plan, after your first 14 days of usage or more than 1000 processed pages per day, whichever comes first, your account is then billed at Unstructured’s standard service usage rates. To keep using the service, you must provide Unstructured with your payment details.

To save money by switching from a pay-per-page to a subscribe-and-save plan, go to the Unstructured Subscribe & Save page and complete the on-screen instructions.

By signing up for a pay-per-page or subscribe-and-save plan, your Unstructured account will run within the context of the Unstructured Platform on Unstructured’s own hosted cloud resources. If you would rather run the Unstructured Platform within the context of your own virtual private cloud (VPC), (or you want to save even more money by making a long-term billing commitment), stop here and sign up through the For Enterprise page instead.

2

Sign in

If you initially signed up for a subscribe-and-save plan instead of a pay-per-page plan, wait to complete this step until after you receive confirmation from Unstructured that your plan is activated. Then go to the Unstructured home page at https://unstructured.io and click Login.

If you signed up through the For Enterprise page instead, your sign-in process will be different. For enterprise sign-in guidance, contact Unstructured Sales at sales@unstructured.io.

  1. After you have signed up for a pay-per-page plan, the Unstructured Platform sign-in page appears.

  2. Click Google or GitHub to sign in with the Google or GitHub account that you signed up with. Or, enter the email address that you signed up with, and then click Sign In.

  3. If you entered your email address, check your email inbox for a message from Unstructured. In that email, click the Sign In link.

  4. The first time you sign in, read the terms and conditions, and then click Accept.

After you have signed in for the first time, you can sign in the second time and beyond by going to the Unstructured home page at https://unstructured.io and clicking Login.

For enterprise sign-in guidance, contact Unstructured Sales at sales@unstructured.io.

3

Get your API key

  1. Sign in to your Unstructured account, at https://platform.unstructured.io.
  2. At the bottom of the sidebar, click your user icon, and then click Account Settings.
  3. On the API Keys tab, click Generate New Key.
  4. Enter some descriptive name for the API key, and then click Save.
  5. Click the Copy icon for your new API key. The API key’s value is copied to your system’s clipboard.

Try the quickstart.

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Set up billing

If you signed up for a pay-per-page plan, you can enjoy a free 14-day trial with usage capped at 1000 pages per day.

If you initially signed up for a subscribe-and-save plan instead, of if you signed up through the For Enterprise page instead, your billing setup and terms will be different. For billing guidance, contact Unstructured Sales at sales@unstructured.io.

At the end of the 14-day free trial, or if you need to go past the trial’s page processing limits during the 14-day free trial, you must set up your billing information to keep using the Unstructured Platform Partition API:

  1. Sign in to your Unstructured account, at https://platform.unstructured.io.
  2. At the bottom of the sidebar, click your user icon, and then click Account Settings.
  3. Click the Billing tab.
  4. Click Manage Payment Method, follow the on-screen instructions to enter or update your payment details, and then click Save card.

Your card is billed monthly based on your usage. The Billing page shows a billing overview for the current month and a list of your billing invoices.

You can save money by switching from a pay-per-page plan to a subscribe-and-save plan. To do this, go to the Unstructured Subscribe & Save page and complete the on-screen instructions.

We calculate a page as follows:

  • For these file types, a page is a page, slide, or image: .pdf, .pptx, and .tiff.
  • For .docx files that have page metadata, we calculate the number of pages based on that metadata.
  • For all other file types, we calculate the number of pages as the file’s size divided by 100 KB.
  • For non-file data, we calculate a page as 100 KB of incoming data to be processed.

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Quickstart

This example uses the curl utility on your local machine to call the Unstructured Platform Partition Endpoint. It sends a source (input) file from your local machine to the Unstructured Platform Partition Endpoint which then delivers the processed data to a destination (output) location, also on your local machine. Data is processed on Unstructured-hosted compute resources.

If you do not have a source file readily available, you could use for example a sample PDF file containing the text of the United States Constitution, available for download from https://constitutioncenter.org/media/files/constitution.pdf.

1

Set environment variables

From your terminal or Command Prompt, set the following two environment variables.

  • Replace <your-unstructured-api-url> with the Unstructured Platform Partition Endpoint URL, which is https://api.unstructuredapp.io/general/v0/general
  • Replace <your-unstructured-api-key> with your Unstructured API key, which you generated earlier on this page.
export UNSTRUCTURED_API_URL=<your-unstructured-api-url>
export UNSTRUCTURED_API_KEY="<your-unstructured-api-key>"
2

Run the curl command

Run the following curl command, replacing <path/to/file> with the path to the source file on your local machine.

If the source file is not a PDF file, then remove ;type=application/pdf from the final --form option in this command.

curl --request 'POST' \
"$UNSTRUCTURED_API_URL" \
--header 'accept: application/json' \
--header "unstructured-api-key: $UNSTRUCTURED_API_KEY" \
--header 'content-Type: multipart/form-data' \
--form 'content_type=string' \
--form 'strategy=vlm' \
--form 'vlm_model_provider=openai' \
--form 'vlm_model=gpt-4o' \
--form 'output_format=application/json' \
--form 'files=@<path/to/file>;type=application/pdf'
3

Examine the results

After you run the curl command, the results are printed to your terminal or Command Prompt. The command might take several minutes to complete.

By default, the JSON is printed without indenting or other whitespace. You can pretty-print the JSON output by using utilities such as jq in future command runs.

You can also pipe the JSON output to a local file by using the curl option -o, —output <file> in future command runs.

You can also call the Unstructured Platform Partition Endpoint by using the Unstructured Python SDK or the Unstructured JavaScript/TypeScript SDK.

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Telemetry

We’ve partnered with Scarf to collect anonymized user statistics to understand which features our community is using and how to prioritize product decision-making in the future.

To learn more about how we collect and use this data, please read our Privacy Policy.

To opt out of this data collection, you can set the environment variable SCARF_NO_ANALYTICS=true before running any commands that call Unstructured hosted APIs.

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