How to prevent/disable automatic list number incrementing in markdown?

Question

How can I disable auto-incrementing list numbers in a markdown file?

What I'm trying to display:

1.first
2.second
2.second
3.third

What is being displayed:

1.first
2.second
3.second
4.third

Is there an easy way to disable this?

Answer 1

Experimenting revealed I can prevent this behavior by escaping the period:

1\.first 
2\.second 
2\.second 
3\.third

Answer 2

I've faced similar issue recently and found @Don P answer helpful. Playing with this feature in Jupyter Notebook I found out that in cases like this it's enough to put backslash only in first row - this may be more convenient for long lists.

1\. first\
2. second\
2. second\
3. third

Your example shouldn't result in numbered list, as it requires to put space after number (note spaces after dots in my code snippet).

Also if you are creating list manually, it requires manual line breaks - (double space) or \ at the end of every line expect the last. I used \ in the example as it is visible.