huggingface/tokenizers

πŸ’₯ Fast State-of-the-Art Tokenizers optimized for Research and Production

11,018

stars

2,000

commits

Rust

primary language

Sep 4, 2026

updated

huggingface.co/docs/tokenizers
bert
gpt
language-model
natural-language-processing
natural-language-understanding
nlp
transformers

README



Build GitHub

Provides an implementation of today's most used tokenizers, with a focus on performance and versatility.

Main features:

  • Train new vocabularies and tokenize, using today's most used tokenizers.
  • Extremely fast (both training and tokenization), thanks to the Rust implementation. Takes less than 20 seconds to tokenize a GB of text on a server's CPU.
  • Easy to use, but also extremely versatile.
  • Designed for research and production.
  • Normalization comes with alignments tracking. It's always possible to get the part of the original sentence that corresponds to a given token.
  • Does all the pre-processing: Truncate, Pad, add the special tokens your model needs.

Performances

Performances can vary depending on hardware, but running the ~/bindings/python/benches/test_tiktoken.py should give the following on a g6 aws instance: image

Bindings

We provide bindings to the following languages (more to come!):

Installation

You can install from source using:

pip install git+https://github.com/huggingface/tokenizers.git#subdirectory=bindings/python

or install the released versions with

pip install tokenizers

Quick example using Python:

Choose your model between Byte-Pair Encoding, WordPiece or Unigram and instantiate a tokenizer:

from tokenizers import Tokenizer
from tokenizers.models import BPE

tokenizer = Tokenizer(BPE())

You can customize how pre-tokenization (e.g., splitting into words) is done:

from tokenizers.pre_tokenizers import Whitespace

tokenizer.pre_tokenizer = Whitespace()

Then training your tokenizer on a set of files just takes two lines of codes:

from tokenizers.trainers import BpeTrainer

trainer = BpeTrainer(special_tokens=["[UNK]", "[CLS]", "[SEP]", "[PAD]", "[MASK]"])
tokenizer.train(files=["wiki.train.raw", "wiki.valid.raw", "wiki.test.raw"], trainer=trainer)

Once your tokenizer is trained, encode any text with just one line:

output = tokenizer.encode("Hello, y'all! How are you 😁 ?")
print(output.tokens)
# ["Hello", ",", "y", "'", "all", "!", "How", "are", "you", "[UNK]", "?"]

Check the documentation or the quicktour to learn more!

Contributors

(top 30 of 143)

n1t0

1,025 commits

Narsil

272 commits

Pierrci

146 commits

ArthurZucker

129 commits

huggingface/tokenizers

πŸ’₯ Fast State-of-the-Art Tokenizers optimized for Research and Production

11,018

stars

2,000

commits

Rust

primary language

Sep 4, 2026

updated

huggingface.co/docs/tokenizers
bert
gpt
language-model
natural-language-processing
natural-language-understanding
nlp
transformers

README



Build GitHub

Provides an implementation of today's most used tokenizers, with a focus on performance and versatility.

Main features:

  • Train new vocabularies and tokenize, using today's most used tokenizers.
  • Extremely fast (both training and tokenization), thanks to the Rust implementation. Takes less than 20 seconds to tokenize a GB of text on a server's CPU.
  • Easy to use, but also extremely versatile.
  • Designed for research and production.
  • Normalization comes with alignments tracking. It's always possible to get the part of the original sentence that corresponds to a given token.
  • Does all the pre-processing: Truncate, Pad, add the special tokens your model needs.

Performances

Performances can vary depending on hardware, but running the ~/bindings/python/benches/test_tiktoken.py should give the following on a g6 aws instance: image

Bindings

We provide bindings to the following languages (more to come!):

Installation

You can install from source using:

pip install git+https://github.com/huggingface/tokenizers.git#subdirectory=bindings/python

or install the released versions with

pip install tokenizers

Quick example using Python:

Choose your model between Byte-Pair Encoding, WordPiece or Unigram and instantiate a tokenizer:

from tokenizers import Tokenizer
from tokenizers.models import BPE

tokenizer = Tokenizer(BPE())

You can customize how pre-tokenization (e.g., splitting into words) is done:

from tokenizers.pre_tokenizers import Whitespace

tokenizer.pre_tokenizer = Whitespace()

Then training your tokenizer on a set of files just takes two lines of codes:

from tokenizers.trainers import BpeTrainer

trainer = BpeTrainer(special_tokens=["[UNK]", "[CLS]", "[SEP]", "[PAD]", "[MASK]"])
tokenizer.train(files=["wiki.train.raw", "wiki.valid.raw", "wiki.test.raw"], trainer=trainer)

Once your tokenizer is trained, encode any text with just one line:

output = tokenizer.encode("Hello, y'all! How are you 😁 ?")
print(output.tokens)
# ["Hello", ",", "y", "'", "all", "!", "How", "are", "you", "[UNK]", "?"]

Check the documentation or the quicktour to learn more!

Contributors

(top 30 of 143)

n1t0

1,025 commits

Narsil

272 commits

Pierrci

146 commits

ArthurZucker

129 commits

Languages

Rust

76.9%

Python

20.8%

TypeScript

1.8%