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I'm trying to write a post in Google plus that has a non-strengthened word with actual *asterisks* around it?

Using asterisks in a G+ triggers strenghtening of the word, and trying to escape them with \ just shows the \*backslashes\* with the asterisks.

Using **two** asterisks around the word does display only one, but also *strengthens* the word.

How do I escape the asterisk characters in a G+ post?

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See this question. – Alex Apr 12 '12 at 11:42
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Google+ doesn't translate HTML character codes; I don't think that question is applicable @Alex. – Myrddin Emrys Apr 12 '12 at 14:56

2 Answers

up vote 2 down vote

It's a really ugly hack, but you can use a zero width space mongolian vowel separator (sic!) to stop the asterisks from being interpreted.

On OS X you can use the bash builtin echo to generate the unicode character. It's not documented in the man page but BSD echo on OS X supports -e to enable interpretation of backslash escapes just like it's GNU counterpart. Copy and pasting the string from the Terminal seems to be problematic but you can pipe the output to pbcopy to send it directly to the pasteboard.

If you wanted to write *foobar* then you could get your patched string like this:

echo -en "*\xe1\xa0\x8efoobar\xe1\xa0\x8e*" | pbcopy

You can use the same workaround to frame your text with the underline character _. The second space isn't strictly necessary but I included it for the sake of symmetry. Maybe someone feels like writing a greasemonkey script to automate this rather clunky process.

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Doesn't seem to work... I tried echo -e "*\xe2\x80\x8bfoobar\xe2\x80\x8b*" | xsel -i --clipboard and then pasting the clipboard content into a G+ post. The word still gets emphasized. Maybe G+ filters the zero width space from the the input. – Ilari Kajaste Aug 3 '12 at 13:52
What happens if you paste the string into a text field on another website or a regular text editor? Do you notice having to press arrow keys two times when moving the cursor over the boundary between the asterisks and the word? – Stefan Schmidt Aug 6 '12 at 0:29
I'm not a linux user, but I see three potential points of failure: xsel, clipboard and the browser. Maybe one of those three strips out the zero width spaces before the string reaches the G+ fields. – Stefan Schmidt Aug 6 '12 at 0:37
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Sadly, G+ seems to ignore the zero width space now, so the hack doesn't work anymore. If it's just about expressing common emotions you might wanna check this out: gist.github.com/157796 – Stefan Schmidt Oct 6 '12 at 19:55
Google seems to have changed its implementation, but I have found another unicode character which breaks the interpretation of the asterisks (see updated posting). – Stefan Schmidt Oct 22 '12 at 19:40
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up vote 1 down vote

I only found out so far, that when there is a space between at least one asterisk and the word, it is written normally.

*asterisk *or * asterisk* would not be bold, but I'm not sure if this solves your problem.

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Well, it's one hackaround, like using ⁎alternate⁎ UTF asterisk character is, but no, it doesn't exactly answer the question since it doesn't get me the result I want. – Ilari Kajaste Apr 12 '12 at 17:39
This is the solution that I've been using on those rare cases when I want the asterisks to appear. – Al Everett Apr 12 '12 at 19:19

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