How to transform uploaded PDF from Streamlit into LangChain document format?

Other Questions langchain
1

I’m working on a Streamlit application that allows users to upload PDF files for automatic question generation. The main issue I’m facing is that when a user uploads a PDF through Streamlit, it creates an uploaded_file object. However, LangChain’s PDF loader requires a local file path to process the document and break it down into smaller text chunks using their text splitter functionality.

I need to find a solution to either convert this uploaded file object directly into a LangChain document format, or discover an alternative approach that works with the uploaded file object without requiring it to be saved locally first. What would be the best way to handle this conversion process?

2

Just save the uploaded file temporarily, then delete it after processing. Use Streamlit’s .read() method to grab the file content, create a temp file with Python’s tempfile module, write the content there, and feed that path to PDFPlumberLoader or PyPDFLoader. Once you’ve got your text chunks, delete the temp file. It’s clean and handles LangChain’s file path requirement perfectly. I’ve run this in production - works great and doesn’t mess up your filesystem.