The Dead Simple Markdown Guide to Escaping Characters

Escaping Characters

To display a literal character that would otherwise be used to format text in a Markdown document, add a backslash () in front of the character.

* Without the backslash, this would be a bullet in an unordered list.


The rendered output looks like this:


* Without the backslash, this would be a bullet in an unordered list.

Characters You Can Escape

You can use a backslash to escape the following characters.

| Character | Name |
|—-|—-|
| | backslash |
| ` | backtick (see also escaping backticks in code) |
| * | asterisk |
| _ | underscore |
| { } | curly braces |
| [ ] | brackets |
| | angle brackets |
| ( ) | parentheses |
| # | pound sign |
| + | plus sign |
| – | minus sign (hyphen) |
| . | dot |
| ! | exclamation mark |
| | | pipe (see also escaping pipe in tables) |

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This guide is a Matt Cone project available on Markdown Guide under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license.

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