What is the reason for the slashes (\) at newlines in the prompt?

Short Course Q&A ChatGPT Prompt Engineering for Developers
1

Hello i have a question.
In the Jupyter Notebook in the “Guidelines” section of the course there is this prompt. Why are newlines ended by a slash character \?
If it is to mark newlines to the model, why is it important in this example for the model to recognize the newlines? Or is it for something else?

text = f"""
You should express what you want a model to do by \ 
providing instructions that are as clear and \ 
specific as you can possibly make them. \ 
This will guide the model towards the desired output, \ 
and reduce the chances of receiving irrelevant \ 
or incorrect responses. Don't confuse writing a \ 
clear prompt with writing a short prompt. \ 
In many cases, longer prompts provide more clarity \ 
and context for the model, which can lead to \ 
more detailed and relevant outputs.
"""

EDIT:
Ok, i have just now read the end of the Jupyter Notebook, where there is actually an explanation i hadn’t seen before:

A note about the backslash

  • In the course, we are using a backslash \ to make the text fit on the screen without inserting newline ‘\n’ characters.
  • GPT-3 isn’t really affected whether you insert newline characters or not. But when working with LLMs in general, you may consider whether newline characters in your prompt may affect the model’s performance.

So this question can be considered answered.

1 Like
2

They are not newlines.

A single backslash is used for line continuation, which allows text to be split into several lines. It is not used for inserting newlines.

2 Likes
3

Hi Mujassim_Jamal. I believe your answer is partially correct. In a string literal, delimited by single or double quotes, ‘foo bar’ or “foo bar”, the backslash is used as a line continuation character as in (Python interpreter):

>>> x = "Will someone \
... please explain \
... what foobar means?"
>>> print(x)
Will someone please explain what foobar means?
>>>

But in a docstring, delimited with triple single or double quotes, hitting the [Enter] or [Return] key does insert a carriage return (\n). The blackslash removes the carriage return following it. In a multi-line docstring, continuation characters are not required.

# docstring with backslashes.
>>> x = """Will someone \
... please explain \
... what foobar means?"""
>>> print(x)
Will someone please explain what foobar means?

# docstring without backslashes. 
>>> x = """Will someone
... please explain
... what foobar means?"""
>>> print(x)
Will someone
please explain
what foobar means?
>>>