Escaping double curly braces inside a markdown code block in Jekyll

Question

I'm using Jekyll to create a documentation site wherein I am trying to document some code that contains handlebars-like syntax. For example {{foo}}. The problem is that Jekyll uses liquid tags and no matter what I do, my double curlies are getting ripped out by the liquid processor.

By the way, I'm using kramdown as the markdown processor.

Here is something I've tried:

{% highlight html linenos %}
  Hello, my name is {{name}}.
{% endhighlight %}

This one removes the {{name}} section completely because it thinks it's a reference to a liquid variable.

I also tried this:

{% highlight html linenos %}
  Hello, my name is \{\{name\}\}.
{% endhighlight %}

In this case, I'm trying to escape the curly braces but the result is that the slashes get rendered into the page.

I even tried this:

{% highlight html linenos %}
  Hello, my name is <span>{</span>{name}}.
{% endhighlight %}

Admittedly this one was pretty dumb. In this case, because I've specified the syntax as html (which it needs to be), the span tag gets rendered into the page.

So how in the world can I resolve this?

Kingmaker

Answer 1

You're looking for the {% raw %} tag.

{% raw %}
Hello, my name is {{name}}.
{% endraw %}

Allseed

What if the code you want to esacape is {% raw %} {{...}} {% endraw %} as one might find in a blog post discussing this very subject ? – Bumboat

@starfry: Funny you should ask... blog.slaks.net/2013-06-10/jekyll-endraw-in-code – Allseed

Answer 2

You can use {% raw %} to ensure content is unmodified by Jekyll:

{% raw %}
This is inserted literally: {{foo}}
{% endraw %}

However, note that this is not a code block. You will need additional code formatting to make your content render as code:

{% raw %}
    I'm a code block, because I'm indented by 4 spaces
{% endraw %}

{% raw %}
```handlebars
I'm a code block that contains {{handlebars}}
with highlighting.
```
{% endraw %}

Applicator

Thanks for that addition. I ended up doing something a bit uglier than that like {% raw %}{{ foo }}{% endraw %} for every occurrence so I'll take a look at what you did here. – Kingmaker

This is a more flexible solution, as it allows to keep the code block and its syntax. – Atchison

Answer 3

With jekyll the code is:

{% highlight html%}
{% raw %}
     <h2> {{ user.name.first | uppercase }}</h2>
     <p> {{ user.email }}</p>
{% endraw %}
{% endhighlight %}

Tadich

worth noting: The above works, also with Rouge highlighter. However raw does however not work if using fenced syntax for highlighting code (three leading backticks like ```html …) – Electroanalysis

Answer 4

For future references: using plain {% raw %} and {% endraw %} is only the second best solution since those are shown if you look up the Markdown on normal github.com.

The best way is to put {% raw %} and {% endraw %} in HTML comments:

<!-- {% raw %} -->
something with curlky brackets like { this } and { that }
<!-- {% endraw %} -->

Due to the HTML comments it is seen by Github as a comment. In Github pages the raw tags will prevent the parsing of the curly brackets in between the tags.

Sherbrooke

That was precisely my concern. The idea with html comments is quite nifty. – Backup

@TheFool Glad that I was able to help someone with this :) – Sherbrooke

Great answer. I had to escape many code block in my markdown file, the easiest solution was to put <!-- {% raw %} --> at the beginning, then put <!-- {% endraw %} --> completely at the end of the article, this way I escaped everything at once. – Planarian

Answer 5

This works in jekyll:

{%raw%}{{thing}}{%endraw%}

Davy

FYI, I included the triple back quote to demonstrate that a code block within Jekyll would work. It wasn't intended to create a code block in the reply :) – Davy