Special characters in GitHub markdown code blocks

Question

Markdown automatically escapes ampersands and angle brackets within a code block, so how is it possible to use special characters that require escaping for example: λ ?

I know that one solution is to edit the HTML output file, however my markdown is for a GitHub page and I don't have access to the generated file.

I use ReText and it allows me to insert a lambda directly in the editor and the preview shows it as well. GitHub's view only shows a small "image missing" type of box.

Answer 1

Use HTML entities style to insert special characters. For example writing

λ

will produce a λ

See this Wikipedia page for the complete reference.