How to escape a pipe char in a code statement in a markdown table?

Question

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.

Answer 1

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)

Answer 2

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.

Answer 3

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 &#124;= y;</code>  |  r2

generating the following output