Connector Framework Server 26.3
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# Split Files into Multiple Documents

Sometimes you might retrieve files from a repository that you would prefer to ingest as multiple documents.

You can use the `TextToDocs` task to split a file containing text (for example an HTML file or XML file) into multiple documents. To divide a file, you specify regular expressions that match the relevant parts of the document. The task creates a main document and one or more child documents, which can all have metadata and content. When you run `TextToDocs` on a document, the original document is discarded. The documents created by `TextToDocs` are metadata-only documents, which means that they do not have an associated file and are not filtered by File Content Extraction.

The `TextToDocs` task should be configured as a Pre task. The parameters that are passed to the task are specified in a named section of the configuration file. For example:

    [ImportTasks]
    Pre0=TextToDocs:MyTextToDocs

    [MyTextToDocs]
    ...

For information about the parameters that you can use to configure this task, refer to the Connector Framework Server Reference.

The `TextToDocs` task expects documents to use UTF-8 character encoding. If your documents are not encoded in UTF-8 you can use the configuration parameter `SourceEncoding` to specify the character set encoding of the source documents, so that they can be converted to UTF-8. If conversion fails, the original encoding is used and CFS adds an error message to the `ImportErrorCode` and `ImportErrorDescription` document fields.

## Example

The following HTML is an example file that you might want to ingest as separate documents. There are clear sections which could represent different topics:

    <html>
      <body>
        <p class="main">Main content</p>

        <div class="section">
          <h1>First document</h1>
          <p class="metadata">Extract as metadata</p>
          <p>Some text</p>
        </div>

        <div class="section">
           <h1>Second document</h1>
           <p class="metadata">Extract as metadata</p>
           <p>Some text</p>
        </div>

        <div class="section">
           <h1>Third document</h1>
           <p class="metadata">Extract as metadata</p>
           <p>Some text</p>
        </div>

      </body>
    </html>

You might want to split this file into a main document and three child documents, one of which might look like this:

    #DREREFERENCE C:\MyFiles\TextToDocs\textToDocs.html:0
    #DREDBNAME FileSystem
    #DREFIELD MyMetadataField="Extract as metadata"
    #DRECONTENT
    First document
    Some text

    #DREENDDOC

To do this, you could use the following configuration:

    [ImportTasks]
    Pre0=TextToDocs:MyTextToDocs

    [MyTextToDocs]
    FilenameMatchesRegex0=.*\.html

    MainRangeRegex0=<html>(.*)</html>
    MainContentRegex0=<p class="main">(.*?)</p>

    ChildrenRangeRegex0=<html>(.*)</html>
    ChildRangeRegex=<div class="section">(.*?)</div>
    ChildContentRegex0=<h1>(.*?)</h1>
    ChildContentRegex1=<p>(.*?)</p>
    ChildFieldName0=MyMetadataField
    ChildFieldRegex0=<p class="metadata">(.*?)</p>
    ChildInheritFields=DREDBNAME

In this example, the `FilenameMatchesRegex` parameter has been set to process only those files that have the extension `.html`.

The `MainContentRegex` parameter identifies parts of the original document to add to the `DRECONTENT` field of the main document.

The `ChildRangeRegex` parameter identifies the parts of the original document that should become child documents. The sub-match `(.*?)` matches all of the content between a `<div class="section">` tag and a `</div>` tag. When this regular expression is applied to the example document above, there are three matches and therefore three child documents are created. It is important to make the regular expression lazy, because otherwise it would match everything between the first `<div class="section">` and the final `</div>`, resulting in a single child document.

The `ChildContentRegex` parameter identifies the content to add to the `DRECONTENT` field of a child document. In this example two regular expressions are used to extract content. The `ChildFieldName` and `ChildFieldRegex` parameters populate metadata fields. In this example a single field named `MyMetadataField` is created.

Setting the parameter `ChildInheritFields=DREDBNAME` specifies that the child documents inherit the field `DREDBNAME` from the original document. If you are indexing documents into a Content component, it is important to set this parameter because (depending on how your system is configured) documents without a `DREDBNAME` field might not be indexed.

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Version 26.3 | Last updated July 2026

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Product: Knowledge Discovery Connector Framework Server 26.3

Topic Title: Split Files into Multiple Documents