LangChain Text Loader

The LangChain Text Loader is a barebones DocumentLoader that reads plain-text files — logs, markdown, code snippets — into the LangChain framework. A single call to loader = TextLoader(“notes.txt”).load returns a list of Document objects containing the file’s contents and metadata such as source path and line count. Unlike PDF or HTML loaders, it does no parsing beyond UTF-8 decoding, making it fast and robust for pure text sources. The output feeds directly into subsequent stages: chunking, embedding, and storing in a vector database such as Chroma or FAISS. Optional arguments allow developers to override metadata keys or handle alternate encodings, while error handling identifies missing files and decodes errors. Because it implements a standard loader interface, teams can prototype a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipeline with TextLoader, and then replace it with more capable loaders—CSV, WebBase—with a single line of code, turning raw .txt resources into searchable knowledge in minutes.