Here's the screenshot of my experience with italic text over Stack Overflow.
Basically it just wraps the word into asterisks and leaves it like this. Here on Meta I do not observe this bug.
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As ChrisF said, the problem is the underscore. _ is a control character, and control characters might behave differently from what you expect.
Just escape the underscore (\_) and it will work:
*unique\_names*
results in
unique_names
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1Still, I wonder if this is expected. On SE sites, emphasis within a word (intra-word emphasis) is explicitly disabled, to avoid emphasis of dear in
hello_dear_world. That said, maybe the expected behavior is that asterisks and underscores in words are totally ignored, and escaping would not be needed? – Arjan Jan 21 '12 at 14:04 -
The current behavior is certainly not what I would expect. For starters,
*_*results in an italic underscore. – Dennis Jan 21 '12 at 14:11 -
Hehe, I hope you had to peek into the HTML source to tell that the underscore is (told to be) rendered italic for
*_*? Spot the difference: _ versus _ ;-) – Arjan Jan 21 '12 at 14:14 -
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Is this a discrepancy between the JavaScript preview and the rendered post? Let's see:
unique_names
No, so they are at least consistent.
I agree it's not exactly what I would expect to happen.
uniquenames*
provides a similar but .. more logical .. result as we disable intra-word emphasis, so perhaps the regex just treats *_ as part of the same character group.
answered Jan 22 '12 at 9:49
_also delimits italic._italic_-> italic – ChrisF♦ Jan 21 '12 at 13:51*unique\_names*or_unique\_names_instead. (So: escape using a backslash.) I wonder if this is expected behavior though! – Arjan Jan 21 '12 at 13:57*unique\_names*-> unique_names (just to prove it works) – ChrisF♦ Jan 21 '12 at 13:58