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Cassidy Williams
Cassidy Williams

Posted on • Originally published at blog.cassidoo.co

Making a single line break in markdown

#markdown #documentation

Sometimes when you write markdown, you'll write some paragraph...

and then you hit "Enter" twice to make another paragraph.

Like this...

...and then this.
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This will render:

<p>Like this...</p>
<p>...and then this.</p>
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But, sometimes you want to make a single line break, kind of like in HTML where you have:

<p>
Like this... <br />
...and then this.
</p>
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In markdown, you can just drop in a <br /> and it'll work perfectly fine. But, if you want to keep your markdown HTML-less, you can add a backslash \ after your line, like so!

Like this...\
...and then this.
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This is supported in most markdown processors, but not all of them. Definitely check on the one you're using before you push to prod. Some processors also allow you to add a double space at the end of a line as well (truly just , hit your spacebar twice), but since a lot of code editor setups trim empty spaces, I personally prefer the backslash way.

Have

fun!

Top comments (5)

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tbroyer profile image
Thomas Broyer •

Well, on DEV, every line break in source is a line break in output, so basically each paragraph must be on a single line. And I must say I hate this, I much prefer one sentence per line (friendlier to Git diff'ing, as I publish on GitHub Pages for my own blog then copy/paste to DEV for reach).

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cassidoo profile image
Cassidy Williams •

DEV does support the double space one, though!

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tbroyer profile image
Thomas Broyer • • Edited

Oh no it's way worse!

foo
bar
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without anything at the end of line, will turn into

<p>
foo<br>
bar
</p>
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I want it to be

<p>foo bar</p>
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And BTW, with the double space, it'll make two <br> ‼

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layzee profile image
Lars Gyrup Brink Nielsen •

Nice!

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mdfold profile image
frank •

The backslash recommendation has aged well: it is visible in review and survives formatters that trim trailing spaces. One portability detail worth adding is that CommonMark treats a plain newline as a soft break, but renderers may expose an option that turns soft breaks into
. I rechecked commonmark.js 0.31.2, markdown-it 15.0.0, and Marked 18.0.9 today: all three agree on backslash and two-space hard breaks, while markdown-it/Marked change plain newlines when breaks is enabled. So the safest production check is parser version + options, not only processor name.