listTokens

ListTokens is a generic term for a function or method used to convert a text string into a sequence of tokens in text processing and programming contexts. Tokenization, the process it supports, is a foundational step in natural language processing, search indexing, and many text-analysis workflows, enabling downstream tasks such as parsing, tagging, and semantic analysis.

A listTokens implementation typically takes a text input and an optional configuration that defines how the text is split into tokens and what characters are treated as delimiters. Common options include converting tokens to lowercase, removing or preserving punctuation, deciding whether numbers should be kept, and determining how to handle contractions or special symbols. Some implementations are language-aware, applying rules specific to a given language, while others offer subword or character-level tokenization used by certain neural models.

Return values usually consist of a list or array of token strings. Some variants also provide metadata such as token offsets (the position of each token in the original text), token types, or a mapping back to the source text. The function may support streaming input for large texts or return tokens in a single batch for smaller inputs.

Typical use cases include preprocessing text for frequency analysis, building vocabularies for machine learning, feature extraction for classifiers, or preparing data for models that operate on token sequences. Performance considerations involve memory usage for long documents, determinism of tokenization rules, and the impact of configuration on downstream results.

See also: tokenization, tokenizer, language model tokenization, subword tokenization.