Table des matières

# Syntaxe

Markdown is intended to be as easy-to-read and easy-to-write as is feasible. [Anonymous Contributors, “type|wiki|fr,” (accessed April 1, 2019).](/fr/wiki/start)

bloc aide

Readability, however, is emphasized above all else. A Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it's been marked up with tags or formatting instructions. The single biggest source of inspiration for Markdown's syntax is the format of plain text email.

[3]: http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax [4]: http://michelf.ca/projects/php-markdown/extra/

To this end, [Markdown's syntax][3] is comprised entirely of punctuation characters, which punctuation characters have been carefully chosen so as to look like what they mean. E.g., asterisks around a word actually look like *emphasis*. Markdown lists look like, well, lists. Even blockquotes look like quoted passages of text, as used in email. The original syntaxe is completed by the complimetary [Markdown Extra][4] which is in use hère.

##Emphasis

—

##Citations

To make citations, use `<cite>` at the beginning of the citation and `</cite>` at the end of the citation.

###Automatic Escaping for Special Characters

In HTML, there are two characters that demand special treatment: `<` and `&`. Left angle brackets are used to start tags; ampersands are used to denote HTML entities. If you want to use them as literal characters, you must escape them as entities, e.g. `<`, and `&`.

Ampersands in particular are bedeviling for web writers. If you want to write about 'AT&T', you need to write '`AT&T`'. You even need to escape ampersands within URLs. Thus, if you want to link to: 

  http://images.google.com/images?num=30&q=larry+bird

you need to encode the URL as: 

  http://images.google.com/images?num=30&q=larry+bird

in your anchor tag `href` attribute. Needless to say, this is easy to forget, and is probably the single most common source of HTML validation errors in otherwise well-marked-up web sites.

Markdown allows you to use these characters naturally, taking care of all the necessary escaping for you. If you use an ampersand as part of an HTML entity, it remains unchanged; otherwise it will be translated into `&`.

So, if you want to include a copyright symbol in your article, you can write: 

  ©

©

and Markdown will leave it alone. But if you write: 

  AT&T

AT&T

Markdown will translate it to: 

  AT&T

Similarly, because Markdown supports [inline HTML](#html), if you use angle brackets as delimiters for HTML tags, Markdown will treat them as such. But if you write: 

  4 < 5

Markdown will translate it to: 

  4 < 5

However, inside Markdown code spans and blocks, angle brackets and ampersands are *always* encoded automatically. This makes it easy to use Markdown to write about HTML code. (As opposed to raw HTML, which is a terrible format for writing about HTML syntax, because every single `<` and `&` in your example code needs to be escaped.)

##Backslash Escapes

<a href=“http://example.com/”>http://example.com/</a> Markdown allows you to use backslash escapes to generate literal characters which would otherwise have special meaning in Markdown's formatting syntax. For example, if you wanted to surround a word with literal asterisks (instead of an HTML `<em>` tag), you can use backslashes before the asterisks, like this: 

  *literal asterisks*

*literal asterisks*

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