escaping asterisks inside italic block

Reported in a Google Groups post.

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Is it possible to escape asterisks within an italic (or bold) block?

What I type in:

*hello* 

\*hello\* 

*\*hello\** 

\**hello*\* 

*hello \* world* 

I expect something like:

<p><em>hello</em></p> 
<p>*hello*</p> 
<p><em>*hello*</em></p> 
<p>*<em>hello</em>*</p> 
<p><em>hello * world</em></p> 

What I get in from markdown-here:

<p><em>hello</em></p> 
<p>*hello*</p> 
<p><em>\</em>hello**</p> 
<p>*<em>hello</em>*</p> 
<p><em>hello \</em> world*</p> 

(style properties removed for readability.) The first two are (as expected) fine. The third thinks I want to italize the backslash. The fourth is the closest, but perhaps I want the asterisks italicized (it sounded fine before I actually read what I am saying …). From the last it appears that the escaped-asterisk is not considered inside a bold/italic block.

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Workaround: Instead of trying to escape the asterisks, use one of the HTML entities for asterisk, like: *

[open-sourceress]

I did use * and it does work, but I agree it’s less obvious. I will fix the >, thank you for that.

[r2evans]

Having a bare > in HTML can be problematic, so converting it to > is the safer thing to do. However, the \<\em> is an issue (as is the unconverted trailing asterisk), apparently MDH is missing the preceding backslash. You can force the literal asterisk with *, I think, though that’s less convenient and obvious.