> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://praison.ai/docs/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# read • AI Agent SDK

> read: Quick OCR - extract and return markdown text.

# read

<div className="flex items-center gap-2">
  <Badge color="purple">Method</Badge>
</div>

> This is a method of the [**OCRAgent**](../classes/OCRAgent) class in the [**ocr\_agent**](../modules/ocr_agent) module.

Quick OCR - extract and return markdown text.

## Signature

```python theme={"theme":{"light":"vitesse-light","dark":"vitesse-dark"}}
def read(source: str) -> str
```

## Parameters

<ParamField query="source" type="str" required={true}>
  URL or path to document/image
</ParamField>

### Returns

<ResponseField name="Returns" type="str">
  Extracted text as markdown string
</ResponseField>

## Uses

* `extract`

## Used By

* [`encode_file_to_base64`](../functions/encode_file_to_base64)
* [`process_video`](../functions/process_video)

## Source

<Card title="View on GitHub" icon="github" href="https://github.com/MervinPraison/PraisonAI/blob/main/src/praisonai-agents/praisonaiagents/agent/ocr_agent.py#L268">
  `praisonaiagents/agent/ocr_agent.py` at line 268
</Card>