How to escape a pipe char in a code statement in a markdown table?
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;.
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 |= y; | r2
and produces the following output
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 |= y;</code> | r2
generating the following output
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)
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.