Escaping Markdown

Sometimes you may want to use a character that Markdown already uses for formatting the document, such as an asterisk or exclamation mark. In these cases, a backslash (\) can be used to “escape” from Markdown formatting being applied using the character.

Any ASCII punctuation character can be escaped with a backslash. ASCII characters are generally the characters found on a standard keyboard such as !, @, and *. For example:

This asterisk pair \*is escaped*\, but this pair *starts emphasising.*

If an non-ASCII character is used, such as a Unicode emoji, the literal backslash will be rendered. For example:

This backslash \😀 is rendered, as is the non-ASCII emoji.

Even though the backslash is an ASCII character, you are not required to escape a backslash with another backslash for it to be rendered. For example:

This backslash \ will be rendered as a literal backslash.