How do I format a {} as inline-code?

[Julien]

When writing or commenting on a ticket or documentation in either JIRA or Confluence, I often highlight variable names or values with the inline-code markers (which is two open curly-braces, text, two closed curly-braces).

{{$foo}}

Now something that comes up regularly is the construct {}, which I just had to make italic instead of inline-code, because I don't understand how to escape it properly to make it show up.

I have tried a variety of things, including backslashes and spaces at various places. In the following I'll use a markdown-like syntax to show which part is highlighted. Things in backticks `$foo` are turning up inside the highlighted area in the rendered JIRA output.

{{{}}}     # {`}`
{{ {} }}   # {{ {} }}
{{\{\}}}   # {`}`
{{\{}}}    # {`}`
{{{\}}}    # {{    (that one is my favourite)
           # {\}}
           # }
{{{{}}}}   # {`}`
{{{}}{{}}} # `}{`

This is highly weird. And very frustrating. This thing is relevant to JavaScript, JSON data and various other programming languages.

How do I make that thing highlighted correctly?

[Martin Seysen]

Found another possible solution here: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-questions/How-can-I-escape-curly-braces-within-code-tags/qaq-p/29147#M4940

Try

{ for {

and

} for }

[Nicolas Lefebvre]

My solution was to separate the }}} with soft hyphens (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_hyphen).

That way, You can do something like this:

{{{ \}­}} # returns { }, code formatted. There is a soft hyphen character between the first and second }.

I'm guessing this comes much too late for Julien, but hopefully any future people seeing this will find this useful.

[Julien]

Yes. Or {code}. But I want to be able to say something like "By default, this method will return {{]}}", but with an empty object, not an empty array.

[kristian.alnaes]

There is now specific programming language support in code blocks. Specify the language in the leading code block as described in the Syntax guide.

Use {code: json} for example to handle those pesky curly braces when pasting json.

[Didier Loiseau]

OP's issue is with inline code style, not code blocks.

[Daniel Gibbs]

Is there still no easy-to-use solution for this?

[Wim Deblauwe]

If you don't need it inline, you can use {noformat}, but you probably know this.