---
title: Node Parser Usage Pattern | Developer Documentation
---

Node parsers are a simple abstraction that take a list of documents, and chunk them into `Node` objects, such that each node is a specific chunk of the parent document. When a document is broken into nodes, all of it’s attributes are inherited to the children nodes (i.e. `metadata`, text and metadata templates, etc.). You can read more about `Node` and `Document` properties [here](/python/framework/module_guides/loading/documents_and_nodes/index.md).

## Getting Started

### Standalone Usage

Node parsers can be used on their own:

```
from llama_index.core import Document
from llama_index.core.node_parser import SentenceSplitter


node_parser = SentenceSplitter(chunk_size=1024, chunk_overlap=20)


nodes = node_parser.get_nodes_from_documents(
    [Document(text="long text")], show_progress=False
)
```

### Transformation Usage

Node parsers can be included in any set of transformations with an ingestion pipeline.

```
from llama_index.core import SimpleDirectoryReader
from llama_index.core.ingestion import IngestionPipeline
from llama_index.core.node_parser import TokenTextSplitter


documents = SimpleDirectoryReader("./data").load_data()


pipeline = IngestionPipeline(transformations=[TokenTextSplitter(), ...])


nodes = pipeline.run(documents=documents)
```

### Index Usage

Or set inside a `transformations` or global settings to be used automatically when an index is constructed using `.from_documents()`:

```
from llama_index.core import SimpleDirectoryReader, VectorStoreIndex
from llama_index.core.node_parser import SentenceSplitter


documents = SimpleDirectoryReader("./data").load_data()


# global
from llama_index.core import Settings


Settings.text_splitter = SentenceSplitter(chunk_size=1024, chunk_overlap=20)


# per-index
index = VectorStoreIndex.from_documents(
    documents,
    transformations=[SentenceSplitter(chunk_size=1024, chunk_overlap=20)],
)
```

## Modules

See the full [modules guide](/python/framework/module_guides/loading/node_parsers/modules/index.md).