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Escaping characters in markdown

Put a backslash in front of a markdown character to show it rather than act on it. It is the way out when your text contains the same symbols markdown uses.

Escaping
\*not italic\*

\# not a heading

2 \* 3 \* 4

*not italic*

# not a heading

2 * 3 * 4

Or use code, which escapes everything at once
`*everything here is literal*`

*everything here is literal*

The characters you can escape are \ ` * _ { } [ ] < > ( ) # + - . ! |. A backslash before anything else is just a backslash.

What usually goes wrong

  • Inside a fenced code block, backslashes are literal: no escaping happens and none is needed.
  • A year at the start of a line (1994.) becomes a numbered list. Escape the dot: 1994\.
  • A backslash at the end of a line is a line break, not an escape.

Related