# Padding should be True, please explain

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**Category:** Beginners\
**Created:** [August 18, 2024, 9:04am UTC](/static-proxy?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdiscuss.huggingface.co%2Ft%2Fpadding-should-be-true-please-explain%2F102837 "2024-08-18T09:04:03Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Sanyam52](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/hellohellohello/user_avatar/discuss.huggingface.co/sanyam52/32/30619_2.png) [@Sanyam52](/static-proxy?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdiscuss.huggingface.co%2Fu%2FSanyam52)%5C
**Post date:** [August 18, 2024, 9:04am UTC](/static-proxy?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdiscuss.huggingface.co%2Ft%2Fpadding-should-be-true-please-explain%2F102837%2F1 "2024-08-18T09:04:03Z")

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In the following code, why are we not making padding = True inside the tokenizer, because don’t we want all the lists to be of the same size?  
max\_length = 128

def preprocess\_function(examples):  
inputs = [ex[“en”] for ex in examples[“translation”]]  
targets = [ex[“fr”] for ex in examples[“translation”]]  
model\_inputs = tokenizer(  
inputs, text\_target=targets, max\_length=max\_length, truncation=True  
)  
return model\_inputs

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Sanyam52](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/hellohellohello/user_avatar/discuss.huggingface.co/sanyam52/32/30619_2.png) [@Sanyam52](/static-proxy?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdiscuss.huggingface.co%2Fu%2FSanyam52)%5C
**Post date:** [August 18, 2024, 9:07am UTC](/static-proxy?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdiscuss.huggingface.co%2Ft%2Fpadding-should-be-true-please-explain%2F102837%2F2 "2024-08-18T09:07:04Z")

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I just read up, padding is the job of DataCollator which pads -100 so that our loss function ignores it.  
Is this correct?