Markdown File Example

Markdown is a lightweight and easy-to-use syntax for styling all forms of writing on the GitHub platform.

Markdown-it demo. Html xhtmlOut breaks linkify typographer highlight CommonMark strict clear permalink html source debug. Fork me on GitHub. The file ending indicates a readme file in markdown format. Markdown converts text into HTML using simple formatting characters. A well-formatted and structured readme file gives users a comprehensive overview of the project. Readme.md: an example in markdown format.

What you will learn:

How the Markdown format makes styled collaborative editing easy
How Markdown differs from traditional formatting approaches
How to use Markdown to format text
How to leverage GitHub’s automatic Markdown rendering
How to apply GitHub’s unique Markdown extensions

What is Markdown?

Markdown is a way to style text on the web. You control the display of the document; formatting words as bold or italic, adding images, and creating lists are just a few of the things we can do with Markdown. Mostly, Markdown is just regular text with a few non-alphabetic characters thrown in, like # or *.

You can use Markdown most places around GitHub:

Comments in Issues and Pull Requests
Files with the .md or .markdown extension

For more information, see “Writing on GitHub” in the GitHub Help.

Examples

It's very easy to make some words bold and other words italic with Markdown. You can even link to Google!

Syntax guide

Here’s an overview of Markdown syntax that you can use anywhere on GitHub.com or in your own text files.

Headers

Emphasis

Lists

Unordered

Ordered

Images

Blockquotes

Inline code

GitHub Flavored Markdown

GitHub.com uses its own version of the Markdown syntax that provides an additional set of useful features, many of which make it easier to work with content on GitHub.com.

Note that some features of GitHub Flavored Markdown are only available in the descriptions and comments of Issues and Pull Requests. These include @mentions as well as references to SHA-1 hashes, Issues, and Pull Requests. Task Lists are also available in Gist comments and in Gist Markdown files.

Syntax highlighting

Here’s an example of how you can use syntax highlighting with GitHub Flavored Markdown:

You can also simply indent your code by four spaces:

Here’s an example of Python code without syntax highlighting:

R Markdown Examples

Task Lists

If you include a task list in the first comment of an Issue, you will get a handy progress indicator in your issue list. It also works in Pull Requests!

Tables

You can create tables by assembling a list of words and dividing them with hyphens - (for the first row), and then separating each column with a pipe |:

Would become:

Markdown File Format

First Header	Second Header
Content from cell 1	Content from cell 2
Content in the first column	Content in the second column

SHA references

Any reference to a commit’s SHA-1 hash will be automatically converted into a link to that commit on GitHub.

Issue references within a repository