I told the model to separate fields with <TAB>. It did exactly that, and I lost 79 percent of my data.
My extraction prompt said: Output lines of the form <key><TAB><value> The model output: Elizabeth<TAB>I have not the pleasure of understanding you Those are five literal characters — angle bracket, T, A, B, angle bracket — not a tab. My parser looked for \t , found none, and dropped the line. Across one document, 246 of 310 records were discarded . Only 5 were dropped for the reason the mechanism…
The model misinterpreted tab characters as literal characters due to a prompt error. Out of 310 records, 246 were discarded, with only 5 due to the intended verification mechanism. The issue was not a complex parser, but a shared counter for unparseable and ungrounded data. To address this, the writer showed a worked example using a pipe character, which significantly improved performance. Additionally, they introduced a flag that outputs raw model replies and breakdowns, allowing for immediate detection of issues.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
