How to escape a pipe char in a code statement in a markdown table?

github escaping pipe markdown

34,855

Solution 1

As of March 2017 using escaped pipes is much easier: \| See other answers.

If you remove the backticks (`), using the | hack works

      a     |  r  
------------|-----
 `a += x;`  |  r1
 a &#124;= y;  |  r2

and produces the following output

enter image description here

Alternatively, you can replace the backticks (`) with a <code></code> markup which fixes the issues more nicely by preserving the rendering

      a     |  r  
------------|-----
 `a += x;`  |  r1
<code>a &#124;= y;</code>  |  r2

generating the following output

enter image description here

Solution 2

As of mid-2017, the pipe may simply be escaped with a backslash, like so: \|

This works both inside and outside of backticks.

The HTML code may now be used again, too, but only outside of backticks.

Previous answer:

As of March 2017, the accepted answer stopped working because GitHub changed their markdown parser. Using another unicode symbol that resembles a pipe seems to be the only option right now, e.g.:

ǀ (U+01C0, Latin letter dental click)

∣ (U+2223, Symbol divides)

⎮ (U+23AE, Integral Extension)

Solution 3

You can escape the | in a table in GFM with a \ like so:

|      a     |  r  
|------------|-----
| `a += x;`  |  r1
| `a \|= y;` |  r2

See https://github.github.com/gfm/#example-191 or https://github.com/dotnet/csharplang/pull/743 for an example.

Solution 4

this works fine in github markdown:

|       a     |  r  
| ------------|-----
|  `a += x;`  |  r1
|  `a \|= y;` |  r2

very similar to https://stackoverflow.com/a/45122039/1426932 but with added | in first column (it didn't render well in comments so I'm adding an answer here).

note that outside a table cell, a \|= y; will render the backslash, but inside a table cell, it won't.

View more solutions

34,855

Author by

Marc de Verdelhan

Updated on April 12, 2021

Comments

Marc de Verdelhan about 3 years
On GitHub I want to build a table containing pieces of code in Markdown. It works fine except when I put a pipe char (i.e. | ) between the backtick (i.e. ` ) chars.

Here is what I want:
```
      a     |  r  
------------|-----
 `a += x;`  |  r1
 `a |= y;`  |  r2
```
The problem is that the vertical bar in the code statement of the second line is interpreted as a column delimiter. Then the table rendering looks pretty ugly. How could I avoid that?

Note that I already tried to use the | HTML code, but it produces a |= y;.
Marc de Verdelhan almost 11 years

Yeah, worked using <code></code> markup! Thank you very much.
Sergej about 8 years

Bitbucket doesn't allow <code>-blocks :-/ is there an other possibility?
Iiridayn almost 7 years

The accepted answer appears to work fine for me in GitHub, both in a Gist and in the pull request I submitted.
jnm2 almost 7 years

On GitHub, the markdown escape \| works. People jump to HTML too fast without trying escaping the markdown.
Stephen Chung over 5 years

Thanks. This works on Github. Github MarkDown seems to recognize the string \| within a table and act accordingly.
knb about 5 years

As of March 2019, in Gitlab Wikis, you still need to use "|" inside the markup code.
Lorenzo Solano Martinez almost 5 years

Still not supported by Bitbucket see bitbucket.org/site/master/issues/17106/…
timotheecour about 3 years

in github, this requires a leading | in 1st column: this works: ``` | a | r | ------------|----- | a += x; | r1 | a \|= y; | r2 ``` (sorry for the formatting due to comment 1-line formatting rules)
rodrigo-silveira almost 3 years

Not supported in PyCharm :(