Security Considerations

MarkItDown performs I/O with the privileges of the current process. Like open() or requests.get(), it will access resources that the process itself can access.

Sanitize your inputs

If any part of the input may be controlled by an untrusted user or system, such as in hosted or server-side applications, it must be validated and restricted before calling MarkItDown. Depending on your environment, this may include restricting file paths, limiting URI schemes and network destinations, and blocking access to private, loopback, link-local, or metadata-service addresses.

Call only the conversion method you need

Prefer the narrowest conversion API that fits your use case. MarkItDown's convert() method is intentionally permissive and can handle local files, remote URIs, and byte streams.

• If your application only needs to read local files, call convert_local() instead.
• If you need more control over URI fetching, call requests.get() yourself and pass the response object to convert_response().
• For maximum control, open a stream to the input you want converted and call convert_stream().