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Microsoft.ML.Tokenizers contains the implmentation of the tokenization used in the NLP transforms.

Published
Sep 9, 2026
1mo ago
Total Downloads
14.3M
14,290,585

Install

dotnet add package Microsoft.ML.Tokenizers --version 3.0.0-preview.26457.2
ProductVersions
.NET
net8.0
.NET Standard
netstandard2.0

README

About

Microsoft.ML.Tokenizers provides an abstraction for tokenizers as well as implementations of common tokenization algorithms.

Key Features

  • Extensible tokenizer architecture that allows for specialization of Normalizer, PreTokenizer, Model/Encoder, Decoder
  • BPE - Byte pair encoding model
  • English Roberta model
  • Tiktoken model
  • Llama model
  • Phi2 model

How to Use

using Microsoft.ML.Tokenizers;
using System.IO;
using System.Net.Http;

//
// Using Tiktoken Tokenizer
//

// Initialize the tokenizer for the `gpt-4o` model. This instance should be cached for all subsequent use.
Tokenizer tokenizer = TiktokenTokenizer.CreateForModel("gpt-4o");

string source = "Text tokenization is the process of splitting a string into a list of tokens.";

Console.WriteLine($"Tokens: {tokenizer.CountTokens(source)}");
// prints: Tokens: 16

var trimIndex = tokenizer.GetIndexByTokenCountFromEnd(source, 5, out string normalizedText, out _);
Console.WriteLine($"5 tokens from end: {(normalizedText ?? source).Substring(trimIndex)}");
// prints: 5 tokens from end:  a list of tokens.

trimIndex = tokenizer.GetIndexByTokenCount(source, 5, out normalizedText, out _);
Console.WriteLine($"5 tokens from start: {(normalizedText ?? source).Substring(0, trimIndex)}");
// prints: 5 tokens from start: Text tokenization is the

IReadOnlyList<int> ids = tokenizer.EncodeToIds(source);
Console.WriteLine(string.Join(", ", ids));
// prints: 1199, 4037, 2065, 374, 279, 1920, 315, 45473, 264, 925, 1139, 264, 1160, 315, 11460, 13

//
// Using Llama Tokenizer
//

// Open a stream to the remote Llama tokenizer model data file.
using HttpClient httpClient = new();
const string modelUrl = @"https://huggingface.co/hf-internal-testing/llama-tokenizer/resolve/main/tokenizer.model";
using Stream remoteStream = await httpClient.GetStreamAsync(modelUrl);

// Create the Llama tokenizer using the remote stream. This should be cached for all subsequent use.
Tokenizer llamaTokenizer = LlamaTokenizer.Create(remoteStream);

string input = "Hello, world!";
ids = llamaTokenizer.EncodeToIds(input);
Console.WriteLine(string.Join(", ", ids));
// prints: 1, 15043, 29892, 3186, 29991

Console.WriteLine($"Tokens: {llamaTokenizer.CountTokens(input)}");
// prints: Tokens: 5

Main Types

The main types provided by this library are:

  • Microsoft.ML.Tokenizers.Tokenizer
  • Microsoft.ML.Tokenizers.BpeTokenizer
  • Microsoft.ML.Tokenizers.EnglishRobertaTokenizer
  • Microsoft.ML.Tokenizers.TiktokenTokenizer
  • Microsoft.ML.Tokenizers.Normalizer
  • Microsoft.ML.Tokenizers.PreTokenizer

Additional Documentation

Related Packages

Feedback & Contributing

Microsoft.ML.Tokenizers is released as open source under the MIT license. Bug reports and contributions are welcome at the GitHub repository.

Changes from Previous Version

No structural changes between v3.0.0-preview.26160.2 and v3.0.0-preview.26457.2.

Adoption Assessment

A verified publisher signal is available. Assess fit from the package's supported frameworks, license and dependency graph rather than popularity alone.

This version is marked prerelease. Validate its API and upgrade path before production use.Compatibility metadata lists 2 target frameworks; confirm the exact target used by your application.

Related Guides & Workflows

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