Tiktoken
tiktoken is an OpenAI-developed library that efficiently encodes text using model-specific byte-pair-encoding tokenizers and supports token counting.
Essential GraphRAG
tiktoken is a tokenization library developed by OpenAI for encoding text and counting language-model tokens.
- How it is used
- Uses token counts to detect oversized sections before splitting documents for retrieval and LLM generation.
- How deep it goes
- Defines and demonstrates model-specific encoding and counting, then stops short of explaining tokenizer internals.
- Examples
- Counts tokens across extracted sections, including sections with 154, 4,186, and 2,703 tokens.
- What you can do after
- Apply it via tiktoken to measure text length and decide when retrieval sections require further splitting.
Generative AI in Action
tiktoken is an OpenAI library for encoding text into the token sequences used by OpenAI language models.
- How it is used
- Supports prompt-cost and context planning by counting the tokens processed or generated by language models.
- How deep it goes
- Explains BPE, direct and model-derived encoding selection, counting, and reversible decoding without descending into algorithmic internals.
- Examples
- Uses Python helpers, the prompt “I have a white dog named Champ,” token ID lists, and OpenAI encoding tables.
- What you can do after
- Apply it via Python to count, encode, and decode text using an encoding selected for an OpenAI model.
Related concepts
- byte pair encodingimplements · Byte-pair encoding is a subword tokenization method that iteratively merges frequent adjacent symbol pairs to build a vocabulary of larger units.
- token countmeasures · A token count is a measure of the number of tokens present in text or processed or generated during a model or corpus operation.
- GPT modeluses · A GPT model is a generative pretrained Transformer language model that produces text autoregressively by predicting successive tokens from preceding context.
- tokenuses · A token is a discrete unit of text, such as a word, word fragment, character, or symbol, represented and processed as an element by a language model.
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