Creating and highlighting code blocks

Fenced code blocks

You can create fenced code blocks by placing triple backticks ``` before and after the code block. We recommend placing a blank line before and after code blocks to make the raw formatting easier to read.

```
function test() {
  console.log("notice the blank line before this function?");
}
```

To display triple backticks in a fenced code block, wrap them inside quadruple backticks.

````
```
Look! You can see my backticks.
```
````

Syntax highlighting

You can add an optional language identifier to enable syntax highlighting in your fenced code block.

For example, to syntax highlight Ruby code:

```ruby
require 'redcarpet'
markdown = Redcarpet.new("Hello World!")
puts markdown.to_html
```

We use Linguist to perform language detection and to select third-party grammars for syntax highlighting. You can find out which keywords are valid in the languages YAML file.

Further reading

• GitHub Flavored Markdown Spec
• "Basic writing and formatting syntax"