I've noticed that I can escape curly braces. That is, if I type \{, I get {. Why are curly braces special characters; what Markdown syntax uses them? I couldn't find anything about it in the editing-help page.
asked Nov 9, 2009 at 6:58
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7Because they are half of a free-hand circle.– GManNickGNov 9, 2009 at 7:20
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1obligatory +1 for mentioning free hand circles– AmarghoshNov 9, 2009 at 7:21
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4All good standards have things that are reserved for future use– beggsNov 9, 2009 at 7:38
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When one uses pandoc to add BibTeX citations to a Markdown document, it inserts some strings involving braces in a way that suggests pandoc expects Markdown to do something special with braces. No idea what that something special is, though.– Daniel HattonJun 30, 2022 at 16:09
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3 Answers
In at lease one extension to Markdown, something called PHP Markdown Extra, braces are used to add an id to a header:
So in that variant of Markdown, this code:
## Header 2 ## {#header2}
Will produce markup like:
<h2 id="header2">Header 2</h2>
I don't see any reference to extensibility on the Markdown Documentation Page, but perhaps the curly braces and other characters are reserved for future use.
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2I guess "reserved for future use" is the best answer I'm going to get. Though the existing symbols are plenty for extensibility; if they need a new bracket, they could use !( for example. Nov 10, 2009 at 19:25
It's just part of Markdown - Markdown provides backslash escapes for the following characters:
\ backslash
` backtick
* asterisk
_ underscore
{} curly braces
[] square brackets
() parentheses
# hash mark
+ plus sign
- minus sign (hyphen)
. dot
! exclamation mark
There's no mention of what special meaning { has anywhere on the syntax page for Markdown though.
The brace ({}) isn't special. But it don't do anything.
Not in this range: {0-9}.
Nor with this range: {aardvark-zebra}
The backslash (\) just looks like it's helping out escape punctuation marks just in case things are done with them.
Special ed maybe.
