How to insert a line break <br> in markdown

I'm trying to create a Markdown file with some paragraphs containing both a link and a line of text on the next line. The problem I've encountered is that when I make a new line after the link, it is rendered with a separate <p> tag.

My Markdown is the following:

[Name of link](url)

My line of text

Which is rendered to the following HTML:

<p>
   <a href="url">Name of link</a>
</p>
<p>My line of text</p>

Instead I want it to render like so:

<p>
    <a href="url">Name of link</a><br>  // not necessarily with a <br> tag but on a separate line
    My line of text
</p>

I've also tried using a single line break in the Markdown:

[Name of link](url)
My line of text

But then both the link and the text is rendered on the same line, but without a line break.

Any suggestions on how to solve this?

Solution 1:

Try adding 2 spaces (or a backslash \) after the first line:

[Name of link](url)
My line of text\

Visually:

[Name of link](url)<space><space>
My line of text\

Output:

<p><a href="url">Name of link</a><br>
My line of text<br></p>

Alternatively you can place a <br> directly into the text. It is valid in Markdown.

Solution 2:

I know this post is about adding a single line break but I thought I would mention that you can create multiple line breaks with the backslash (\) character:

Hello
\
\
\
World!

This would result in 3 new lines after "Hello". To clarify, that would mean 2 empty lines between "Hello" and "World!". It would display like this:

World!

Personally I find this cleaner for a large number of line breaks compared to using <br>.

Note that backslashes are not recommended for compatibility reasons. So this may not be supported by your Markdown parser but it's handy when it is.

Solution 3:

After a long search, I found this solution:

\
 
\
 

This will produce:

<br> <br>