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After using Markdown almost every day for ten years now (this blog is Markdown-based), today I learned not one, not two, but three new things about it.

Tierney shared on Twitter that two backticks are valid Markdown. Kevin joined the party and told everyone that four backticks are also valid. 😲

And this was enough, so I headed over to the GitHub Markdown docs to look for new things, only to discover that three stars are also valid Markdown syntax. 🤯

Here's an example for "cursive and(!) bold" (***) and an inline code quote:

This text is ***cursive and bold***. Here are escaped backticks: `` `foo` ``.

Which renders as follows:

This text is cursive and bold. Here are escaped backticks: `foo`.

And if you want to include backticks in a code block, four backticks work, too.

```
Look! There are three backticks in this code block!
```

I have no idea how I never came across these!

Markdown rendering always depends on your rendering library. Ensure your renderer supports all the advanced Markdown features before going all-in with them.

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About Stefan Judis

Frontend nerd with over ten years of experience, freelance dev, "Today I Learned" blogger, conference speaker, and Open Source maintainer.

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