How can I prevent that Jira misunderstands pairs of "-" as strikethrough markup?

[Christoph Stritt]

I enter text (for example in German:
'Vor- und Nachteile meiner "xy"-Lösung'
and Jira misunderstands the "-" after "Vor" and the "-" before "Lösung" as a pair of special characters so that the middle part of my text becomes strike-through text:
'Vor und Nachteile meiner "xy"Lösung'

[Kseniia Trushnikova · Accepted solution]

Hi @Christoph Stritt,

You can use a backslash before dashes, like this:

\- text \-

Vor\- und Nachteile meiner "xy"\-Lösung

This will prevent Jira from misinterpreting dashes as strikethrough.

[Christoph Stritt]

Thank you, I have gladly "accepted" your answer, too.

The backslash apparently is an all-purpose one-character escape which I can use while typing text into a Jira task description or a Jira task comment.

The important things for me to keep in mind are:

1. I must not forget, that Jira will misunderstand some or all of the following characters:  _  -  *  ?  (and also the character combination  :)  which in my system is automatically converted to a smiley) 
   and I must always remember to escape each of these dangerous characters with its own preceding backslash. And
2. I must keep in mind that when I edit an existing description, all these escape characters have to be re-entered!
   In my (new) experience, the backslash works as intended during the first saving of my description, but then it becomes not only invisible but it is lost from the text.

Kind regards, Christoph

[Christos Markoulatos · Accepted solution]

@Christoph Stritt 

here as some options

Replace - with – (en dash) or ‑ (non-breaking hyphen):

Vor– und Nachteile meiner "xy"–Lösung

Wrap the text in {noformat} or {{code}}

{noformat}
Vor- und Nachteile meiner "xy"-Lösung
{noformat}

[Christoph Stritt]

Thank you. I have gladly "accepted" your answer. I can't say anything about a keyword "{{code}}" in double curly braces, but what works for me is the following:

I am working on a Jira task description or a Jira task comment. As soon as I type one of the keywords "{noformat}" or "{code}" in single curly braces, the following happens:

A framed text box appears (which apparently is a "noformat" text box or a "code" text box -- both look exactly the same here and both display text in the same monospace font) and from this moment on, I am typing inside this text box and all my underscores and question marks and asterisks and hyphen characgters are completely left alone by the Jira text processor. With the "arrow-down" key I can leave this code box and continue with normal text.

Kind regards, Christoph