An apparatus and method of line coding to mitigate collision induced errors in Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) optical communications systems is disclosed. The apparatus and method prevents Soliton-Soliton-Collision induced errors by reducing a variance in a number of possible collisions between solitons in multiple channels in a WDM fiber optic communication system using a sliding window criterion. The sliding window criterion defines a set of parametric values based on physical properties of the transmission network, a transmission frequency and a defined data block size. N-bit codes are iteratively selected and sequentially assigned to segments of a mapping table indexed by all possible unique combinations of "1"s and "0"s in a block of data. Input data blocks are mapped to corresponding code words having a reduced number of transitions for transmission on the fiber optic network. Received code words are converted back to a data stream corresponding to the input data stream.