How to escape a pipe char in a code statement in a markdown table?

Question

On GitHub I want to build a table containing pieces of code in Markdown. It works fine except when I put a pipe char (i.e. | ) between the backtick (i.e. ` ) chars.

Answer 1

As of March 2017 using escaped pipes is much easier: \| See other answers.

If you remove the backticks (`), using the | hack works

      a     |  r  
------------|-----
 `a += x;`  |  r1
 a |= y;  |  r2

and produces the following output

Alternatively, you can replace the backticks (`) with a markup which fixes the issues more nicely by preserving the rendering

      a     |  r  
------------|-----
 `a += x;`  |  r1
a |= y;  |  r2

generating the following output