# Prompts

Prompts for chat models are built around messages, instead of just plain text.

You can make use of templating by using a `MessagePromptTemplate`. You can build a `ChatPromptTemplate` from one or more `MessagePromptTemplates`. You can use `ChatPromptTemplate`'s `format_prompt` -- this returns a `PromptValue`, which you can convert to a string or Message object, depending on whether you want to use the formatted value as input to an llm or chat model.

For convenience, there is a `from_template` method defined on the template. If you were to use this template, this is what it would look like:


```python
from langchain.prompts import PromptTemplate
from langchain.prompts.chat import (
    ChatPromptTemplate,
    SystemMessagePromptTemplate,
    AIMessagePromptTemplate,
    HumanMessagePromptTemplate,
)

template="You are a helpful assistant that translates {input_language} to {output_language}."
system_message_prompt = SystemMessagePromptTemplate.from_template(template)
human_template="{text}"
human_message_prompt = HumanMessagePromptTemplate.from_template(human_template)
```


```python
chat_prompt = ChatPromptTemplate.from_messages([system_message_prompt, human_message_prompt])

# get a chat completion from the formatted messages
chat(chat_prompt.format_prompt(input_language="English", output_language="French", text="I love programming.").to_messages())
```

<CodeOutputBlock lang="python">

```
    AIMessage(content="J'adore la programmation.", additional_kwargs={})
```

</CodeOutputBlock>

If you wanted to construct the MessagePromptTemplate more directly, you could create a PromptTemplate outside and then pass it in, e.g.:


```python
prompt=PromptTemplate(
    template="You are a helpful assistant that translates {input_language} to {output_language}.",
    input_variables=["input_language", "output_language"],
)
system_message_prompt = SystemMessagePromptTemplate(prompt=prompt)
```


