# Conditional syntax for reusable prompts

**URL:** <https://community.openai.com/t/conditional-syntax-for-reusable-prompts/1361865>\
**Category:** Prompting\
**Tags:** api, feature-request, gpt-5, prompts, responses-api\
**Created:** [October 10, 2025, 12:11pm UTC](https://community.openai.com/t/conditional-syntax-for-reusable-prompts/1361865 "2025-10-10T12:11:31Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![code\_poet](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/openai1/user_avatar/community.openai.com/code_poet/32/688341_2.png) [@code\_poet](https://community.openai.com/u/code_poet)\
**Post date:** [October 10, 2025, 12:11pm UTC](https://community.openai.com/t/conditional-syntax-for-reusable-prompts/1361865/1 "2025-10-10T12:11:31Z")

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Hi everyone,  
I’m using reusable prompts with Response API and would like to handle optional variables without hardcoding text in the code. In my case, I sometimes need to apply a specific style to the response text, but this parameter isn’t always provided — it depends on the user’s choice.

It would be great to have a conditional template syntax for variables in reusable prompts (for example, to include certain instructions only if a variable is defined). I couldn’t find any mentions of such functionality in the documentation.

Is there currently any way to achieve this?  
And if not, I think adding conditional logic support would be a very useful feature for prompt templates. Perhaps OpenAI could consider implementing support for a lightweight template language like Handlebars or something similar, which would make prompt customization much more flexible.

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![blerg5](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/openai1/user_avatar/community.openai.com/blerg5/32/514743_2.png) [@blerg5](https://community.openai.com/u/blerg5)\
**Post date:** [October 14, 2025, 1:51pm UTC](https://community.openai.com/t/conditional-syntax-for-reusable-prompts/1361865/2 "2025-10-14T13:51:06Z")

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I don’t think you can do that on the Openai platform right now, but Promptlayer and Prompthub are two platforms that do. I like promptlayer.

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![code\_poet](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/openai1/user_avatar/community.openai.com/code_poet/32/688341_2.png) [@code\_poet](https://community.openai.com/u/code_poet)\
**Post date:** [October 15, 2025, 9:53am UTC](https://community.openai.com/t/conditional-syntax-for-reusable-prompts/1361865/3 "2025-10-15T09:53:56Z")

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Thanks, I didn’t know about these platforms. I’ll take a look.  
However, I’m mostly using the API and saving my prompts directly in the dashboard, where I can test and optimize them.  
It would be great if we could have some built-in syntax for these kinds of conditional cases in the future, right out of the box.