Hacker Read

warent · 2017-11-29 05:43:45+00:00

I'm confused, why do you have to escape an asterisk?

euroclydon | karma 3708 | avg karma 2.27 · | 2010-03-17 11:19:48

btw, how did you escape that asterisk in quotes?

schoen | karma 20422 | avg karma 3.65 · | 2016-05-31 16:40:03+00:00

Edit: I had a guess about how to escape asterisks here, and it didn't work!

joecool1029 | karma 4507 | avg karma 3.08 · | 2016-11-01 22:10:30+00:00

Sorry, none of us could figure out how to escape the asterisks, how'd you do it? Feel like I'm trying to triforce here.

shaklee3 | karma 2976 | avg karma 1.62 · | 2018-12-29 23:51:46

What's the point of this? It seems like it's the same as not including the asterisk in the first place.

pessimizer | karma 33733 | avg karma 2.47 · | 2022-10-28 08:07:05

You can escape asterisks on HN with \.

staunch | karma 28228 | avg karma 4.34 · | 2010-03-05 19:24:07+00:00

The asterisk is used for italics. If you leave one at the end of your comment it does this, it seems.

vxNsr | karma 4947 | avg karma 1.9 · | 2021-05-06 23:39:03

I think he’s trying to escape the asterisk but doesn’t realize that’s not required as long as there isn’t another one following it.

dang | karma 18142 | avg karma 0.25 · | 2015-06-23 21:07:27+00:00

Just don't ask me how to get a literal asterisk in there.

jeffbee | karma 21041 | avg karma 2.25 · | 2024-04-23 16:00:20

Yes. I reflexively avoid asterisks on this site because they can hose your formatting.

ramses0 | karma 1283 | avg karma 2.03 · | 2022-02-17 15:43:26

I just see asterisks?

mikorym | karma 1675 | avg karma 1.54 · | 2019-11-01 12:31:27+00:00

Wow, forgot about the \asterisk being a reserved character.

JadeNB | karma 5437 | avg karma 1.21 · | 2014-09-06 06:11:46+00:00

Because asterisks are meant to hide the fine print, not make it easily accessible?

jwilk | karma 8094 | avg karma 2.47 · | 2017-11-08 11:28:33+00:00

AFAIK there's no way to escape asterisks on HN. Backslashes certainly don't work. :(

bjeanes | karma 280 | avg karma 1.66 · | 2022-12-06 17:15:00

I just preceded the asterisks with a backslash.

umanwizard | karma 14757 | avg karma 2.5 · | 2017-04-26 13:56:12+00:00

Your asterisk got interpreted as italicization and screwed up your post.

cryptoz | karma 19110 | avg karma 4.75 · | 2010-11-02 12:54:22

I actually couldn't get the asterisk to appear without adding text below it, and I didn't have anything else to add. So I just added an explanation.

Don't worry! I didn't feel like I needed to explain. But the formatting on HN is odd, and the rule on how to use asterisks is obscure and bizarre.

klyrs | karma 20410 | avg karma 2.5 · | 2021-12-11 19:37:30

At least use a backslash... escape the asterisk and you get sh*t not sht sht.

sangnoir | karma 15035 | avg karma 2.79 · | 2023-04-23 18:03:30

You needed to escape your asterisks in order to show the mark-up like \*this\*

skrebbel | karma 32746 | avg karma 5.58 · | 2022-04-12 08:12:53

I did not know you could backslash-escape asterisks (TIL! thanks!), so I prepended it with 4 spaces to make a code block.