Universal Document Reader

Purpose

Return extracted text from any supported file in a single unified JSON envelope. The tool dispatches by file extension, you always call the same tool regardless of format.

Supported formats

Category	Extensions	Notes
PDF	.pdf	Text pages extracted in ms; scanned/image pages fall back to OCR
Word	.docx	Paragraphs + table cells
Excel	.xlsx, .xls	All sheets, first 100 rows per sheet as preview
PowerPoint	.pptx	Slide text content
Images	.png/.jpg/.jpeg/.gif/.bmp/.webp/.tiff	OCR only
CSV / TSV	.csv, .tsv	Raw text with encoding fallback
Plain text	.txt/.md/.log/.rst	Encoding fallback
Config	.json/.yaml/.yml/.toml/.ini/.cfg/.env	Raw text
Markup	.html/.htm/.xml	Raw text (no HTML stripping)
Source code	.py/.js/.ts/.tsx/.go/.rs/.java/.cpp/.c/.sql/.sh/...	Raw text
Unknown extension	anything else	Best-effort read as UTF-8/GBK text

Blocked (rejected at /upload): executables (.exe/.dll/.so/...) and archives (.zip/.tar/...). Ask the user to unpack archives locally first.

Usage

Always call the tool directly, do not run Python from bash.

read_document(file_path="uploads/paper.pdf")
read_document(file_path="uploads/annual_report.pdf", pages="1-10")
read_document(file_path="uploads/contract.docx")
read_document(file_path="uploads/sales.xlsx")
read_document(file_path="uploads/deck.pptx")
read_document(file_path="uploads/chart.png")     # image → OCR
read_document(file_path="uploads/config.yaml")
read_document(file_path="uploads/notes.md")

The pages parameter only applies to PDF; other formats ignore it.

Return envelope

All formats share this shape:

{
  "status": "ok",
  "file": "paper.pdf",
  "format": "pdf",
  "char_count": 52000,
  "truncated": true,
  "text": "..."
}

Format-specific extra fields: