title: Using italic in markdown for words that end with a star
body: <p>I'm not quite sure where to ask this question and whether StackOverflow is the right place, so please apologize if it is not. Anyway, although my question is not directly related to programming itself, it concerns a task that is related to programming: Writing documentation.</p>
  
  <p>I write documentation using GitHub-Flavored Markdown, and in one document on web services I am using the term <code>WS-*</code>. Now I want to emphasize this term by making it italic, so usually I do this like this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>*foo*
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The problem with <code>WS-*</code> now is that it already ends with a star, so I get:</p>
  
  <pre><code>*WS-**
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Which is not correctly recognized by my Markdown parser, as it interpretes this as <code>open italic</code> and <code>close bold</code>.</p>
  
  <p>How can I correctly write this in valid Markdown, that is compatible to the standard (and hence works with standard-compliant parsers)?</p>