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This Quickstart walks you through your first call to the Parse v2 API. In under five minutes you will have a structured Markdown rendering of your document, ready for use in downstream workflows like RAG, search, or extraction.

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Prerequisites

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Make Your First Parse Request

This tutorial guides you through how to parse a sample customer due diligence form. This example uses all default parameters.
1

Install jq

Install jq, a free third-party command-line tool that will help you save files later in this procedure. Some common install instructions are below; to see all installation methods, go to the jq site.
2

Parse a document

Run the code below to parse the form. The > at the end of the command saves the response to a file called parse-output.json.Replace YOUR_API_KEY with your API key.
3

Save the Markdown content

To process the output, you may need to pass the markdown field from parse-output.json to your downstream tasks.Run the following command to save the markdown field to a file called markdown-kyc-form.md.

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What You Get Back

You now have markdown-kyc-form.md: a Markdown rendering of the form, ready to use directly in a RAG application, search index, or LLM prompt. The full response in parse-output.json also includes a structure field with the document’s pages and blocks (each block carries its own bounding-box grounding) and a metadata field with job information; see Parse API Response to dig into those.

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What’s Next

How Parse Works

Understand the response shape in depth: pages, blocks, and grounding.

Try the Playground

Run Parse against your own files without writing code.

Credit Consumption

See how credit usage is calculated per page.

Troubleshoot

Status codes, errors, and how to resolve them.