---
title: "FileToFileContent"
id: filetofilecontent
slug: "/filetofilecontent"
description: "`FileToFileContent` reads local files and converts them into `FileContent` objects"
---

# FileToFileContent

`FileToFileContent` reads local files and converts them into `FileContent` objects. These are ready for multimodal AI pipelines that need to pass PDFs and other file types to an LLM.

<div className="key-value-table">

|  |  |
| --- | --- |
| **Most common position in a pipeline** | Before a `ChatPromptBuilder` in a query pipeline                                                      |
| **Mandatory run variables**            | `sources`: A list of file paths or ByteStreams                                                        |
| **Output variables**                   | `file_contents`: A list of `FileContent` objects                                                      |
| **API reference**                      | [Converters](/reference/converters-api)                                                               |
| **GitHub link**                        | https://github.com/deepset-ai/haystack/blob/main/haystack/components/converters/file_to_file_content.py |
| **Package name** | `haystack-ai` |

</div>

## Overview

`FileToFileContent` processes a list of file sources and converts them into `FileContent` objects that can be embedded
into a `ChatMessage` and passed to a Language Model.

Each source can be:

- A file path (string or `Path`), or
- A `ByteStream` object.

Optionally, you can provide extra provider-specific information using the `extra` parameter. This can be a single dictionary (applied to all files) or a list matching the length of `sources`.

Support for passing files to LLMs varies by provider. Some providers do not support file inputs, some restrict support
to PDF files, and others accept a wider range of file types.

## Usage

### On its own

```python
from haystack.components.converters import FileToFileContent

converter = FileToFileContent()

sources = ["document.pdf", "recording.mp3"]

result = converter.run(sources=sources)
file_contents = result["file_contents"]
print(file_contents)

# [
# FileContent(
#     base64_data='JVBERi0x...', mime_type='application/pdf',
#     filename='document.pdf', extra={}
# ),
# FileContent(
#     base64_data='SUQzBA...', mime_type='audio/mpeg',
#     filename='recording.mp3', extra={}
# )
# ]
```

### In a pipeline

Use `FileToFileContent` together with a `LinkContentFetcher` and a `ChatPromptBuilder` to build a pipeline that fetches a remote file, converts it, and passes it to an LLM.

```python
from haystack.components.converters import FileToFileContent
from haystack.components.fetchers import LinkContentFetcher
from haystack.components.generators.chat.openai import OpenAIChatGenerator
from haystack.components.builders import ChatPromptBuilder

from haystack import Pipeline

template = """
{% message role="user"%}
{% for file in files %}
{{ file | templatize_part }}
{% endfor %}
What's the main takeaway of the following document? Just one sentence.
{% endmessage %}
"""

pipeline = Pipeline()
pipeline.add_component("fetcher", LinkContentFetcher())
pipeline.add_component("converter", FileToFileContent())
pipeline.add_component("prompt_builder", ChatPromptBuilder(template=template))
pipeline.add_component("llm", OpenAIChatGenerator(model="gpt-4.1-mini"))

pipeline.connect("fetcher", "converter")
pipeline.connect("converter", "prompt_builder")
pipeline.connect("prompt_builder", "llm")

results = pipeline.run({"fetcher": {"urls": ["https://arxiv.org/pdf/2309.08632"]}})

print(results["llm"]["replies"][0].text)

# The document is a satirical paper humorously claiming that pretraining a
# small language model exclusively on evaluation benchmark test sets can achieve
# perfect performance, highlighting issues of data contamination in model
# evaluation.
```
