MarkdownV2 escaper for Telegram bots

Telegram's MarkdownV2 parse mode rejects messages with any of _*[]()~`>#+=-|{}.! outside of valid syntax. Paste your message and we'll show you the escaped version that will actually send.

Escaped output (paste into Bot API)

Preview (what Telegram will render)

Why MarkdownV2 is finicky

Telegram's original Markdown parser was lenient — extra characters were just ignored. MarkdownV2 (released 2020) is strict: every character in _ * [ ] ( ) ~ ` > # + - = | { } . ! must be either part of a valid markup token or escaped with a backslash. An unescaped one returns Bad Request: can't parse entities.

Reference — what needs escaping where

Common gotchas

• Dots and exclamation marks. Sentences ending in . or ! are 90% of the "MarkdownV2 won't send" tickets. Always escape them.
• URLs with parens. Wikipedia-style URLs (...(disambiguation)) break [text](url). Escape the closing paren inside the URL: \).
• Hyphens in numbers / phone formats. +1-555-1234 needs each - escaped. Or switch to HTML parse mode.
• Bullet lists with *. A leading * item looks like bold-open. Escape: \* item or switch to HTML mode.
• Tables. | must be escaped — and Telegram doesn't render tables anyway, so just don't ship them.

Alternative: HTML parse_mode

If MarkdownV2's escaping is fighting you, switch parse_mode to HTML. You only need to escape < > &, and tags like <b>, <i>, <code>, <pre>, <a href="…"> work as expected.