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f273a7cb83
### sectioner-does-not-consider-separator-length
**Executive Summary.** A primary responsibility of the sectioner is to
minimize the number of chunks that need to be split mid-text. It does
this by computing text-length of the section being formed and
"finishing" the section when adding another element would extend its
text beyond the window size.
When element-text is consolidated into a chunk, the text of each element
is joined, separated by a "blank-line" (`"\n\n"`). The sectioner does
not currently consider the added length of separators (2-chars each) and
so forms sections that need to be split mid-text when chunked.
Chunk-splitting should only be necessary when the text of a single
element is longer than the chunking window.
**Example**
```python
elements: List[Element] = [
Title("Chunking Priorities"), # 19 chars
ListItem("Divide text into manageable chunks"), # 34 chars
ListItem("Preserve semantic boundaries"), # 28 chars
ListItem("Minimize mid-text chunk-splitting"), # 33 chars
] # 114 chars total but 120 chars with separators
chunks = chunk_by_title(elements, max_characters=115)
```
Want:
```python
[
CompositeElement(
"Chunking Priorities"
"\n\nDivide text into manageable chunks"
"\n\nPreserve semantic boundaries"
),
CompositeElement("Minimize mid-text chunk-splitting"),
]
```
Got:
```python
[
CompositeElement(
"Chunking Priorities"
"\n\nDivide text into manageable chunks"
"\n\nPreserve semantic boundaries"
"\n\nMinimize mid-text chunk-spli"),
)
CompositeElement("tting")
```
### Technical Summary
Because the sectioner does not consider separator (`"\n\n"`) length when
it computes the space remaining in the section, it over-populates the
section and when the chunker concatenates the element text (each
separated by the separator) the text exceeds the window length and the
chunk must be split mid-text, even though there was an even element
boundary it could have been split on.
### Fix
Consider separator length in the space-remaining computation.
The solution here extracts both the `section.text_length` and
`section.space_remaining` computations to a `_TextSectionBuilder` object
which removes the need for the sectioner
(`_split_elements_by_title_and_table()`) to deal with primitives
(List[Element], running text length, separator length, etc.) and allows
it to focus on the rules of when to start a new section.
This solution may seem like overkill at the moment and indeed it would
be except it forms the foundation for adding section-level chunk
combination (fix: dissociated title elements) in the next PR. The
objects introduced here will gain several additional responsibilities in
the next few chunking PRs in the pipeline and will earn their place.