How to Escape Characters in Markdown

CommonMark lets you backslash-escape any ASCII punctuation character: \ ` * _ { } [ ] ( ) # + - . ! | < > and the rest. A backslash before anything else — a letter, a digit, a space — is just a literal backslash, so \n does not become a newline and \w stays exactly as typed. In practice only a handful of escapes matter day to day: asterisks and underscores that would start emphasis, a hash at the start of a line that would become a heading, square brackets that would open a link, and a number followed by a period at the start of a line — 1999\. prevents the year from kicking off an ordered list that renders as "1." Position matters for most of these: a hash in the middle of a sentence needs no escape at all, because it only means "heading" at the start of a line.

The escape you cannot avoid is the pipe in tables. Any literal | inside a cell splits that cell in two, so documenting a shell pipeline like grep foo | sort silently breaks the column layout. Write it as \| instead. GFM extends the escape into code spans within table cells — `a \| b` works there, even though backslashes are normally literal inside code — and the HTML entity &#124; is the fallback for renderers that do not honor the backslash form.

Literal asterisks come up constantly in technical writing: glob patterns like *.md, wildcard arguments like *args, and bullet characters in quoted text all start emphasis spans that swallow the asterisk and italicize whatever follows until the parser finds a mate. Escaping fixes it (\*.md), but inline code is usually the better tool — `*.md` needs no escaping at all, signals "this is a literal token" to the reader, and protects every character inside, including underscores in names like _private or MAX_VALUE_ that would otherwise trigger emphasis at word boundaries.

Backticks have their own escape story. Outside code, \` produces a literal backtick like any other punctuation escape. But to show a backtick inside inline code, the backslash does nothing — use a longer delimiter instead: double backticks with a space, `` `code` ``, display the inner backticks literally. That points at the rule people break most: never escape inside code blocks or code spans. Within ``` fences and `spans`, backslashes are ordinary characters, so \* renders as a visible backslash followed by an asterisk. If your output shows stray backslashes, check whether the escaped text accidentally sits inside code formatting.