How to escape backslash bracket (\[) in Markdown?

Question

How does one escape the \"backslash square brackets\" \\[ \\] sequence in Markdown for GitHub? The sequence produces a

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Answer 1

just write:

This is a __backslash with a square bracket__: \\\[.  

It works on github for me.

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Edit

Now that the question has been updated, here is an updated answer.
Just escape all characters, at the beginning and at the end:

foo \\\[something\\\] bar will produce => foo \[something\] bar

Works normally on github: http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=oh2xyp&s=6

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Edit 2

Just tried on a wiki... you're right, it doesn't work there. I guess it's because of the special meaning that constructs like [[foobar]] have in the wiki syntax.
I'd say your best shot is this: __\__ __[__ __something__ __\__ __]__ (without code backsticks).
Weirdly it doesn't work here, but it works on github wikis.

Still, if you think it's a bug, you should report it as they say here.

Answer 2

I have resorted to surrounding my bracketed string with backticks: `[[320,50],[300,250]]`

Which turns it into: [[320,50],[300,250]] So now my array doesn't turn into a link.

Answer 3

There doesn't appear to be a way to do it. A workaround is to use a Gist to store such files (in my case a Bash script).

I will reassign to a better answer if someone comes up with a real solution.

Update: Use backticks to escape the escape char. See the new accepted answer.

Answer 4

This is now fixed on GitHub. So there is no need to escape square brackets anymore. To type [some text], you could just type:

// your markdown
[some text]

This is good for two reasons:

1. square brackets are no longer parsed separately from figure and hyper-links.
2. This means that we could use \] and \[ for display latex math, which is the correct way to write LaTeX. ($$ is not a LaTeX command and should never be used.)

You can check this by editing the README.md of a GitHub project.

Answer 5

This has been fixed on github.com. I'm not sure when, but you can now escape square brackets with a single backlash. EG

\[Hello\]

is rendered as

[Hello]