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How to split Markdown by Headers

Motivation​

Many chat or Q+A applications involve chunking input documents prior to embedding and vector storage.

These notes from Pinecone provide some useful tips:

When a full paragraph or document is embedded, the embedding process considers both the overall context and the relationships between the sentences and phrases within the text. This can result in a more comprehensive vector representation that captures the broader meaning and themes of the text.

As mentioned, chunking often aims to keep text with common context together. With this in mind, we might want to specifically honor the structure of the document itself. For example, a markdown file is organized by headers. Creating chunks within specific header groups is an intuitive idea. To address this challenge, we can use MarkdownHeaderTextSplitter. This will split a markdown file by a specified set of headers.

For example, if we want to split this markdown:

md = '# Foo\n\n ## Bar\n\nHi this is Jim  \nHi this is Joe\n\n ## Baz\n\n Hi this is Molly'

We can specify the headers to split on:

[("#", "Header 1"),("##", "Header 2")]

And content is grouped or split by common headers:

{'content': 'Hi this is Jim  \nHi this is Joe', 'metadata': {'Header 1': 'Foo', 'Header 2': 'Bar'}}
{'content': 'Hi this is Molly', 'metadata': {'Header 1': 'Foo', 'Header 2': 'Baz'}}

Let's have a look at some examples below.

Basic usage:​

%pip install -qU langchain-text-splitters
from langchain_text_splitters import MarkdownHeaderTextSplitter
markdown_document = "# Foo\n\n    ## Bar\n\nHi this is Jim\n\nHi this is Joe\n\n ### Boo \n\n Hi this is Lance \n\n ## Baz\n\n Hi this is Molly"

headers_to_split_on = [
    ("#", "Header 1"),
    ("##", "Header 2"),
    ("###", "Header 3"),
]

markdown_splitter = MarkdownHeaderTextSplitter(headers_to_split_on)
md_header_splits = markdown_splitter.split_text(markdown_document)
md_header_splits
[Document(page_content='Hi this is Jim  \nHi this is Joe', metadata={'Header 1': 'Foo', 'Header 2': 'Bar'}),
 Document(page_content='Hi this is Lance', metadata={'Header 1': 'Foo', 'Header 2': 'Bar', 'Header 3': 'Boo'}),
 Document(page_content='Hi this is Molly', metadata={'Header 1': 'Foo', 'Header 2': 'Baz'})]
type(md_header_splits[0])
langchain_core.documents.base.Document

By default, MarkdownHeaderTextSplitter strips headers being split on from the output chunk's content. This can be disabled by setting strip_headers = False.

markdown_splitter = MarkdownHeaderTextSplitter(headers_to_split_on, strip_headers=False)
md_header_splits = markdown_splitter.split_text(markdown_document)
md_header_splits
[Document(page_content='# Foo  \n## Bar  \nHi this is Jim  \nHi this is Joe', metadata={'Header 1': 'Foo', 'Header 2': 'Bar'}),
 Document(page_content='### Boo  \nHi this is Lance', metadata={'Header 1': 'Foo', 'Header 2': 'Bar', 'Header 3': 'Boo'}),
 Document(page_content='## Baz  \nHi this is Molly', metadata={'Header 1': 'Foo', 'Header 2': 'Baz'})]

How to return Markdown lines as separate documents​

By default, MarkdownHeaderTextSplitter aggregates lines based on the headers specified in headers_to_split_on. We can disable this by specifying return_each_line:

markdown_splitter = MarkdownHeaderTextSplitter(
    headers_to_split_on,
    return_each_line=True,
)
md_header_splits = markdown_splitter.split_text(markdown_document)
md_header_splits
[Document(page_content='Hi this is Jim', metadata={'Header 1': 'Foo', 'Header 2': 'Bar'}),
 Document(page_content='Hi this is Joe', metadata={'Header 1': 'Foo', 'Header 2': 'Bar'}),
 Document(page_content='Hi this is Lance', metadata={'Header 1': 'Foo', 'Header 2': 'Bar', 'Header 3': 'Boo'}),
 Document(page_content='Hi this is Molly', metadata={'Header 1': 'Foo', 'Header 2': 'Baz'})]

Note that here header information is retained in the metadata for each document.

How to constrain chunk size:​

Within each markdown group we can then apply any text splitter we want, such as RecursiveCharacterTextSplitter, which allows for further control of the chunk size.

markdown_document = "# Intro \n\n    ## History \n\n Markdown[9] is a lightweight markup language for creating formatted text using a plain-text editor. John Gruber created Markdown in 2004 as a markup language that is appealing to human readers in its source code form.[9] \n\n Markdown is widely used in blogging, instant messaging, online forums, collaborative software, documentation pages, and readme files. \n\n ## Rise and divergence \n\n As Markdown popularity grew rapidly, many Markdown implementations appeared, driven mostly by the need for \n\n additional features such as tables, footnotes, definition lists,[note 1] and Markdown inside HTML blocks. \n\n #### Standardization \n\n From 2012, a group of people, including Jeff Atwood and John MacFarlane, launched what Atwood characterised as a standardisation effort. \n\n ## Implementations \n\n Implementations of Markdown are available for over a dozen programming languages."

headers_to_split_on = [
    ("#", "Header 1"),
    ("##", "Header 2"),
]

# MD splits
markdown_splitter = MarkdownHeaderTextSplitter(
    headers_to_split_on=headers_to_split_on, strip_headers=False
)
md_header_splits = markdown_splitter.split_text(markdown_document)

# Char-level splits
from langchain_text_splitters import RecursiveCharacterTextSplitter

chunk_size = 250
chunk_overlap = 30
text_splitter = RecursiveCharacterTextSplitter(
    chunk_size=chunk_size, chunk_overlap=chunk_overlap
)

# Split
splits = text_splitter.split_documents(md_header_splits)
splits
[Document(page_content='# Intro  \n## History  \nMarkdown[9] is a lightweight markup language for creating formatted text using a plain-text editor. John Gruber created Markdown in 2004 as a markup language that is appealing to human readers in its source code form.[9]', metadata={'Header 1': 'Intro', 'Header 2': 'History'}),
 Document(page_content='Markdown is widely used in blogging, instant messaging, online forums, collaborative software, documentation pages, and readme files.', metadata={'Header 1': 'Intro', 'Header 2': 'History'}),
 Document(page_content='## Rise and divergence  \nAs Markdown popularity grew rapidly, many Markdown implementations appeared, driven mostly by the need for  \nadditional features such as tables, footnotes, definition lists,[note 1] and Markdown inside HTML blocks.', metadata={'Header 1': 'Intro', 'Header 2': 'Rise and divergence'}),
 Document(page_content='#### Standardization  \nFrom 2012, a group of people, including Jeff Atwood and John MacFarlane, launched what Atwood characterised as a standardisation effort.', metadata={'Header 1': 'Intro', 'Header 2': 'Rise and divergence'}),
 Document(page_content='## Implementations  \nImplementations of Markdown are available for over a dozen programming languages.', metadata={'Header 1': 'Intro', 'Header 2': 'Implementations'})]

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