Backslash Escapes

A backslash turns the character after it into ordinary text, stripping itself from the output. It is how you write a character that would otherwise be markup.

Escaping Markup Characters

Keep *stars* and ``backticks`` as literal characters, while strong and emphasis next to them still work normally. A doubled backslash writes one backslash: 2 \ 3.

The Escaped Space

A backslash before a space removes both, which is how markup gets attached to neighbouring text without a visible gap:

• foo\ *bar*\ baz renders as foobarbaz — one word, with the middle in italics.

• Without the escapes, foo *bar* baz renders as foo bar baz.

The same escape marks a deliberately empty cell in the first column of a simple table, where a blank cell would otherwise be ambiguous:

Escapes Are Not Processed in Literals

Inline literals take their content verbatim, so a backslash inside one stays put: C:\path\to\file and re.compile(r"\d+").

The same is true of literal blocks:

grep -oP '\d+\.\d+' file.txt

Escaping Typography

Smart typography sees the escapes too, so an escaped -- pair stays two hyphens while a real – pair becomes an en dash, and escaped ... dots stay three dots while real … dots become an ellipsis.

Escapes in Roles

A role's content is un-escaped before the role interprets it, so spawn* displays spawn* while still resolving the target spawnl.