Why does markdown need an escape for \. to show a slash dot

Question

Why does markdown need an escape \ before the \.path to render this name\of\.path correctly. Without the escape it renders name\of.path

i.e. it must be coded as name\of\\.path to get name\of\.path

Answer 1

Markdown uses backslash as an escape character:

Markdown allows you to use backslash escapes to generate literal characters which would otherwise have special meaning in Markdown’s formatting syntax. For example, if you wanted to surround a word with literal asterisks (instead of an HTML <em> tag), you can use backslashes before the asterisks, like this:

\*literal asterisks\*

Markdown provides backslash escapes for the following characters:

\   backslash
`   backtick
*  asterisk
_   underscore
{}  curly braces
[]  square brackets
()  parentheses
#   hash mark
+   plus sign
-   minus sign (hyphen)
.   dot
!   exclamation mark

Note that the period ("dot") is included in this list. Therefore, a single backslash preceding a period simply escapes the period. To escape the backslash itself (and therefore display it literally) it must be escaped with a second backslash.