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Delimiters

Delimitatori (Delimiters)

Delimiters are characters or markers used in a prompt to clearly separate its different parts: instructions, context, data to process, examples. The most common: triple quotes ("""), triple backticks (```), XML tags (<document>...</document>), dashes or uppercase headers.

Definition

They stop the model from confusing your instructions with the content: if you ask it to summarize an email that itself contains instructions ("reply to me by tomorrow"), delimiters make clear what is your command and what is text to analyze. They're also a basic defense against prompt injection.

Practical example: "Summarize the text between the tags. <text> [customer email] </text>. Output: 3 bullet points.", a clean structure, zero ambiguity. Models like Claude are explicitly trained to respect XML tags, making them the most robust choice for professional prompts.

Related terms

• Prompt
• Prompt Injection
• System Prompt
• Output Format
• Prompt Template

More in Prompting

• Prompt
• Prompting
• Role Assignment
• Zero-shot
• Few-shot
• Chain of Thought
• Prompt Engineering
• Output Format

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