How do I prevent auto-generated links in the GitHub wiki?

Question

On a GitHub wiki page, if I type:

www.foobar.com

GitHub automatically assumes this is a URL and makes the text a hyperlink to http://www.foobar.com. However, sometimes I do not want a hyperlink to be created. Is there a way to stop this behavior? Perhaps some sort of markdown?

Answer 1

Update Nov. 2021, VSCode 1.63:

This issue should be allievated with issue 136198 "markdown preview wrongly creates links "

While "markdown.preview.linkify": false will disable linkify features entirely, setting md.linkify.fuzzyLink to false will disable it only for links without http(s) header.
Which, I think, is a better alternative, and it's already supported by markdown-it.

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Original answer (2014): This isn't limited to wiki page, and is part of the GFM (GitHub Flavored Markdown) url autolinking feature.

Putting them in `` can work but display the url as a code: foo http://example.com bar.

foo `http://example.com` bar

Another trick (mentioned in this gist) is

ht<span>tp://</span>example.com 

That will display http://example.com as regular text.

In your case (without the http://)

w<span>ww.</span>foobar.com

That would also display www.foobar.com as regular text.

geekley adds in the comments:

For emails, you can use foo<span>@</span>example.com

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Venryx suggests in the comments a shorter/cleaner solution:

Just add one of the void element tags (I prefer <area>), at a location that breaks the URL detectability, eg. right before the first dot.

Example: www<area>.foobar.com

Answer 2

Also, if you are having a issue with something other than a URL auto-linking I found escaping the . works as well.

Example:

foobar.web -> foobar.web

Answer 3

You can use a zero-width space to prevent most auto-linkers from interpreting characters as a URL

Here's an example with a zero width space inserted between https and :

https​://example.com/

To insert one, you can copy from the url above or this page

See also this thread on twitter

Answer 4

You can also just apply a backslash escape to the colon (or any of the other punctuation, apparently), like this:

http\://www.foobar.com