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Showdown Markdown Syntax

Estevão Soares dos Santos edited this page Jan 28, 2017 · 6 revisions

PerfKit Explorer supports Showdown, a Markdown to HTML converter written in JavaScript. To learn more, visit https://github.com/showdownjs/showdown/wiki/Showdown's-Markdown-syntax.

Paragraphs

Paragraphs in Markdown are just one or more lines of consecutive text followed by one or more blank lines.

On July 2, an alien mothership entered Earth's orbit and deployed several dozen 
saucer-shaped "destroyer" spacecraft, each 15 miles (24 km) wide.
    
On July 3, the Black Knights, a squadron of Marine Corps F/A-18 Hornets, 
participated in an assault on a destroyer near the city of Los Angeles.

The implication of the “one or more consecutive lines of text” is that Markdown supports “hard-wrapped” text paragraphs. This means the following examples produce the same output:

A very long line of text
A very
long line
of text

If you DO want to add soft line breaks (which translate to <br> in HTML) to a paragraph, you can do so by adding 3 space characters to the end of the line ( ).

Headings

Atx Style

You can create a heading by adding one or more # symbols before your heading text. The number of # you use will determine the size of the heading. This is similar to atx style.

# The largest heading (an <h1> tag)
## The second largest heading (an <h2> tag)###### The 6th largest heading (an <h6> tag)

The space between # and the heading text is not required but you can make that space mandatory by enabling the option requireSpaceBeforeHeadingText.

You can wrap the headings in #. Both leading and trailing # will be removed.

## My Heading ##

Setext style

You can also use setext style headings, although only two levels are available.

This is an H1
=============
    
This is an H2
-------------

Markdown generates bookmarks anchors in titles automatically, by adding an id property, based on the heading text, to the heading.

Blockquotes

You can indicate blockquotes with a >.

In the words of Abraham Lincoln:
    
> Pardon my french

Blockquotes can have multiple paragraphs and can have other block elements inside.

> A paragraph of text
>
> Another paragraph
>
> - A list
> - with items

Styling text

You can make text bold, italic or strikethrough

*This text will be italic*
**This text will be bold**
	~~This text will be strikedthrough~~ 

Both bold and italic can use either a * or an _ around the text for styling. This allows you to combine both bold and italic if needed.

**Everyone _must_ attend the meeting at 5 o'clock today.**

Code formatting

Inline formats

Use single backticks (`) to format text in a special monospace format. Everything within the backticks appear as-is, with no other special formatting.

Here's an idea: why don't we take `SuperiorProject` and turn it into `**Reasonable**Project`.
<p>Here's an idea: why don't we take <code>SuperiorProject</code> and turn it into <code>**Reasonable**Project</code>.</p>

Multiple lines

To create blocks of code you should indent it by four spaces.

    this is a piece
    of
    code

You can also use triple backticks (```) to format text as its own distinct block.

Check out this neat program I wrote:

```
x = 0
x = 2 + 2
what is x
```

Lists

Markdown supports ordered (numbered) and unordered (bulleted) lists.

Unordered lists

You can make an unordered list by preceding list items with either a *, a - or a +. Markers are interchangeable too.

* Item
+ Item
- Item

Ordered lists

You can make an ordered list by preceding list items with a number.

1. Item 1
2. Item 2
3. Item 3

It’s important to note that the actual numbers you use to mark the list have no effect on the HTML output Markdown produces. So you can use the same number in all items if you wish to.

TaskLists (GFM Style)

Markdown also supports GFM styled takslists.

 - [x] checked list item
 - [ ] unchecked list item
  • checked list item
  • unchecked list item

List syntax

List markers typically start at the left margin, but may be indented by up to three spaces.

   * this is valid
   * this is too  

List markers must be followed by one or more spaces or a tab.

To make lists look nice, you can wrap items with hanging indents:

*   Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit.
    Aliquam hendrerit mi posuere lectus. Vestibulum enim wisi,
    viverra nec, fringilla in, laoreet vitae, risus.
*   Donec sit amet nisl. Aliquam semper ipsum sit amet velit.
    Suspendisse id sem consectetuer libero luctus adipiscing.

But if you want to be lazy, you don’t have to

If one list item is separated by a blank line, Markdown will wrap all the list items in <p> tags in the HTML output. So this input:

* Bird

* Magic
* Johnson

Results in:

<ul>
<li><p>Bird</p></li>
<li><p>Magic</p></li>
<li><p>Johnson</p></li>
</ul>

This differs from other markdown implementations such as GFM (github) or commonmark.

Nested blocks

List items may consist of multiple paragraphs. Each subsequent paragraph in a list item must be indented by either 4 spaces or one tab:

1.  This is a list item with two paragraphs. Lorem ipsum dolor
    sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Aliquam hendrerit
    mi posuere lectus.

    Vestibulum enim wisi, viverra nec, fringilla in, laoreet
    vitae, risus. Donec sit amet nisl. Aliquam semper ipsum
    sit amet velit.

2.  Suspendisse id sem consectetuer libero luctus adipiscing.

This is valid for other block elements such as blockquotes:

*   A list item with a blockquote:

    > This is a blockquote
    > inside a list item.

or event other lists.

Nested lists

You can create nested lists by indenting list items by four spaces.

1.  Item 1
    1. A corollary to the above item.
    2. Yet another point to consider.
2.  Item 2
    * A corollary that does not need to be ordered.
    * This is indented four spaces
    * You might want to consider making a new list.
3.  Item 3

To nest a third (or more) sublist level, you need to indent 4 extra spaces (or 1 extra tab) for each level.

1.  level 1
    1.  Level 2
        *   Level 3
    2.  level 2
        1.  Level 3
1.  Level 1

Nested code blocks

You can nest fenced codeblocks the same way you nest other block elements, by indenting by fours spaces or a tab:

1.  Some code:

    ```js
    var foo = 'bar';
    console.log(foo);
    ```

To put a indented style code block within a list item, the code block needs to be indented twice — 8 spaces or two tabs:

1.  Some code:

    var foo = 'bar';
    console.log(foo);

Links

Simple

If you wrap a valid URL or email in <> it will be turned into a link whose text is the link itself.

link to <http://www.google.com/>

this is my email <somedude@mail.com>

In the case of email addreses, Markdown will also perform a bit of randomized decimal and hex entity-encoding to help obscure your address from address-harvesting spambots. You can disable this obfuscation setting encodeEmails option to false.

Markdown can also automagically turn every valid URL it finds in the text body to links for you, without the need to wrap them in <>.

link to http://www.google.com/

this is my email somedude@mail.com

Inline

You can create an inline link by wrapping link text in brackets ( [ ] ), and then wrapping the link in parentheses ( ( ) ).

For example, to create a hyperlink to github.com/Markdownjs/Markdown, with a link text that says, Get Markdown!, you'd write this in Markdown: [Get Markdown!](https://github.com/Markdownjs/Markdown).

Reference Style

You can also use the reference style, like this:

this is a [link to google][1]

[1]: www.google.com

Markdown also supports implicit link references:

this is a link to [google][]

[google]: www.google.com

Images

Markdown uses an image syntax that is intended to resemble the syntax for links, also allowing for two styles: inline and reference.

Inline

Inline image syntax looks like this:

![Alt text](url/to/image)

![Alt text](url/to/image "Optional title")

That is:

  • An exclamation mark: !;
  • followed by a set of square brackets, containing the alt attribute text for the image;
  • followed by a set of parentheses, containing the URL or path to the image, and an optional title attribute enclosed in double or single quotes.

Reference Style

Reference-style image syntax looks like this:

![Alt text][id]

Where “id” is the name of a defined image reference. Image references are defined using syntax identical to link references:

[id]: url/to/image  "Optional title attribute"

Implicit references are also supported in images, similar to what happens with links:

![Markdown logo][]

[Markdown logo]: http://Markdownjs.github.io/demo/img/editor.logo.white.png

Image dimensions

You can also define the image dimensions, like this:

![Alt text](url/to/image =250x250 "Optional title")

or in reference style:

![Alt text][id]

[id]: url/to/image =250x250

Tables

Tables aren't part of the core Markdown spec, but they are part of GFM and Markdown supports them.

| Tables        | Are           | Cool  |
| ------------- |:-------------:| -----:|
| **col 3 is**  | right-aligned | $1600 |
| col 2 is      | *centered*    |   $12 |
| zebra stripes | ~~are neat~~  |    $1 |

Colons can be used to align columns. The outer pipes (|) are optional, matching GFM spec. You also don't need to make the raw Markdown line up prettily. You can also use other markdown syntax inside them.

Escaping markdown entities

Markdown allows you to use backslash (\) escapes to generate literal characters which would otherwise have special meaning in markdown’s syntax. For example, if you wanted to surround a word with literal underscores (instead of an HTML <em> tag), you can use backslashes before the unserscores, like this:

\_literal underscores\_

Markdown provides backslash escapes for the following characters:

\   backslash
`   backtick
*   asterisk
_   underscore
{}  curly braces
[]  square brackets
()  parentheses
#   hash mark
+   plus sign
-   minus sign (hyphen)
.   dot
!   exclamation mark