WhatsApp Formatting Preview

In short WhatsApp formatting is close enough to Markdown to be misleading and different in every case that matters. Bold is a single asterisk on each side, not two. Italic is a single underscore. Strikethrough is a single tilde, where Markdown uses two. Monospace is triple backticks even for inline text, where Markdown uses one. Links have no syntax at all — a bare URL becomes clickable and there is no way to attach a label to it, so the address itself is what people see. The single-asterisk rule is the one that catches almost everyone, because typing two asterisks out of Markdown habit produces literal asterisks around bolded text rather than clean bold. Two further points. The markup only works when the symbols sit directly against the text with no space between, so an asterisk followed by a space is left as an asterisk. And formatting does not carry across when a message is quoted or forwarded to some clients, so anything essential should read correctly without it. Previewing before sending is the reliable way to check.