Unstructured

How to use Unstructured in a web scraping pipeline

Unstructured partitions supported documents into elements for further processing. It can sit between a crawler's file archive and the chunking or indexing stages used for search and retrieval.

A practical workflow

1. A separate crawler saves the original HTML, PDF or other supported file with its source URL and collection identifier.
2. Choose the appropriate partition function and strategy, then extract document elements and available metadata.
3. Validate and transform those elements into chunks or records, keeping references to the original document before loading the destination.

When it fits

Use this when one collection contains several document types but downstream consumers need a consistent processing boundary. Choosing a strategy per format can be more useful than assuming every file should be treated as plain text.

Boundaries

Partitioning is not a guarantee of accurate reading order, tables or semantic interpretation. Supported strategies and dependencies vary by format. Unstructured does not replace the acquisition stage; apply limits to untrusted inputs and review empty, incomplete or unexpectedly segmented results before publishing them.