Few-Shot Example Formatter

Two columns of examples in, correctly formatted few-shot prompts out as chat messages, XML, labelled text or markdown — with the per-request token cost of carrying them.

Your examplesTwo columns: the input, then the answer you want. Quoted cells with commas inside are handled.

Column separator

Output shape

Instruction above the examplesOptional. Becomes the system message in chat format.

Input label

Answer label

First row is a headerCharacters per tokenCharacters per token. An estimate — nothing here runs a tokenizer.

chars

Examples formatted

Every example is re-sent with every request that uses this prompt, so the count below is a per-request cost, not a one-off.

Average characters per example: 36
Estimated tokens per example: ≈ 9
Formatted block, characters: 746
Estimated tokens for the whole block: ≈ 187

Formatted examplesRead-only. Select all and copy.

What this assumes: two columns, in the order input then answer. A row with fewer usable columns is reported by line number rather than skipped quietly, and a row with more keeps its first two and tells you what it left. In chat format the examples become alternating user and assistant turns, which is how most chat models expect to see them — some providers instead want them inside one user message, so check yours. Everything on this page runs in your browser. Nothing you paste is uploaded, logged or sent anywhere.

Few-shot examples are the cheapest reliable way to pin down a format. They are also the most expensive part of a prompt to leave lying around, because unlike an instruction they scale: ten examples of two hundred characters each is two thousand characters on every single request, forever, whether or not the model needed the tenth one.

Format follows the model

A chat model has been trained on alternating turns, so examples given as real user and assistant messages tend to be followed more closely than the same examples pasted into one block. A completion-style model has not, and does better with labelled plain text it can continue. XML-tagged blocks sit in the middle and have the advantage of being unambiguous about where an example ends — worth it when your inputs are multi-line.

Balance is a real problem

Order and proportion both leak into the output. If every example you show has the same label, expect that label; if your examples run easy-to-hard, expect the model to weight the last ones. The check above catches only the crudest version of this — every answer identical — but it is the version that actually happens when someone pastes the first twenty rows of a sorted spreadsheet.

Few-Shot Example Formatter

Format follows the model

Balance is a real problem

The reasoning behind this

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