This blog post will explain how to encode a text sequence with Python. A text sequence has to be encoded into numbers in order to be processed by a neural network. There has to be a function named encode declared that takes two arguments. The first argument being a list of words that is encoded. The second argument being a dictionary.

def encode(words,values):
    seq = []
    for word in words:
        seq.append(values[word])
    return seq

A list of words is declared containing words to be encoded.

words = ["maple", "walnut", "maple", "oak", "walnut"]

The variable unique is set to a list function that takes the function set(words) as an argument. The set function eliminates all duplicates from a list.

unique = list(set(words))

A dictionary called dic is declared that will hold all of the words encoding values.

dic = {word: i + 1 for i, word in enumerate(unique)}

The variable result holds the result of the encode function. After that, the results are printed to the screen.

result = encode(unique,dic)
print(result)

This is what the whole source code looks like.

def encode(words,values):
    seq = []
    for word in words:
        seq.append(values[word])
    return seq

words = ["maple", "walnut", "maple", "oak", "walnut"]
unique = list(set(words))
dic = {word: i + 1 for i, word in enumerate(unique)}
result = encode(unique,dic)
print(result)