How to count tokens precisely when using openAI GPT models

If you are working with GPT models, it is essential to keep track of the number of tokens in your input text. OpenAI’s GPT models have a token limit, and exceeding this limit will result in a token limit error. To avoid this, you need to precisely count the number of tokens in your input text before sending it to OpenAI.

In this blog, we will show you how to count tokens accurately using the tiktoken Python package.

To begin, you will need to install the tiktoken package by running the following command:

pip install --upgrade tiktoken

Notice that Requiretment: Python versoin >=3.8

Once you have installed the package, you can use the following code to count the number of tokens in your input text:

import tiktoken

#Use tiktoken.encoding_for_model() to automatically load the correct encoding for a given model name.
# for gpt4 just swtich "gpt-3.5-turbo" with "gpt-4"
encoding = tiktoken.encoding_for_model("gpt-3.5-turbo")

text = ”how are you doing"

# calculuate the number of tokens 
num_token = len(encoding.encode(text))

In this code, we first load the encoding for the GPT-3.5-turbo model using the tiktoken.encoding_for_model() method. This method automatically loads the correct encoding for a given model name.

Next, we define our input text and calculate the number of tokens using the len() function on the encoded text.

Finally, we print the number of tokens to the console.

By using the tiktoken package to count the number of tokens in your input text, you can avoid token limit errors when sending requests to OpenAI’s GPT models.