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firecrawl parse
Turn a local document into clean markdown on disk. Supports PDF, DOCX, DOC, ODT, RTF, XLSX, XLS, HTML/HTM/XHTML.
When to use
- You have a file on disk (not a URL) and want its text as markdown
- User drops a PDF/DOCX and asks what it says, or to summarize it
- Use
scrapeinstead when the source is a URL
Quick start
Always save to .firecrawl/ with -o — parsed docs can be hundreds of KB and blow up context if streamed to stdout. Add .firecrawl/ to .gitignore.
mkdir -p .firecrawl
# File → markdown
firecrawl parse ./paper.pdf -o .firecrawl/paper.md
# AI summary
firecrawl parse ./paper.pdf -S -o .firecrawl/paper-summary.md
# Ask a question about the doc
firecrawl parse ./paper.pdf -Q "What are the main conclusions?" \
-o .firecrawl/paper-qa.md
Then head, grep, rg etc., or incrementally read the file - don't load the whole thing at once.
Options
| Option | Description |
|---|---|
-S, --summary |
AI-generated summary |
-Q, --query <prompt> |
Ask a question about the parsed content |
-o, --output <path> |
Output file path — always use this |
-f, --format <fmt> |
markdown (default), html, summary |
--timeout <ms> |
Timeout for the parse job |
--timing |
Show request duration |
Tips
- Quote paths with spaces:
firecrawl parse "./My Doc.pdf" -o .firecrawl/mydoc.md. - Max upload size: 50 MB per file.
- Credits: ~1 per PDF page; HTML is 1 flat.
- Check
.firecrawl/before re-parsing the same file. - To check your credit balance (recommended for batch processing and similar workflows), use the
firecrawl credit-usagecommand.
See also
- firecrawl-scrape — same idea for URLs
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