Escaping < and > has weird behavior

[nicfv]

Problem

Escaping angled brackets sometimes shows \

Description

Hi, what is the official way to escape angled brackets? To me, it seems like <tag\> works the best with mkdocs but escaping all the brackets like \<tag\> makes the most sense. Check out my example code below with associated screenshot, and the markdown contents pasted directly into this post. Here is a brief summary of my findings.

ID	Option	Works in VS Code?	GitHub?	Mkdocs?
1	<tag>	No	No	No
2	\<tag>	Yes	Yes	No (renders \)
3	<tag\>	Yes	Yes	Yes
4	\<tag\>	Yes	Yes	Sort of (renders \<tag>)

Proposed Solution

I have 2 ideas here.

1. Simply check if any < or > character is preceded by a \ and make sure it is properly escaped.
2. Add a config option that when turned on, converts all instances of \< and \> to the HTML entities, > and <

References

Raw Markdown:

# 1 <tag> 1
# 2 \<tag> 2
# 3 <tag\> 3
# 4 \<tag\> 4

```
1 <tag> 1
2 \<tag> 2
3 <tag\> 3
4 \<tag\> 4
```

- 1 <tag> 1
- 2 \<tag> 2
- 3 <tag\> 3
- 4 \<tag\> 4\

Mkdocs Markdown:

VS Code Markdown:

GitHub Markdown:

1 1

2 <tag> 2

3 <tag> 3

4 <tag> 4

1 <tag> 1
2 \<tag> 2
3 <tag\> 3
4 \<tag\> 4

• 1 1
• 2 <tag> 2
• 3 <tag> 3
• 4 <tag> 4

[nicfv]

I discovered this because of my workflow using typedoc2md/typedoc-plugin-markdown#564 and realized that the behavior of mkdocs doesn't match that of standard markdown editors.

[oprypin]

This behavior is entirely up to MkDocs' dependency https://github.com/Python-Markdown/markdown, so nothing that can be done here.