you might have seen people using the shrug emoticon on these forums or elsewhere on the internet, but when you try to put it in your forum post, it looks like this:
¯_(ツ)_/¯
instead of like this:
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
doesn't the second one look better?
that's because of formatting.
you probably know that if you type something like **this** it looks like this, that's because of formatting.
the shrug emoticon contains two formatting characters:
the backslash: \
and the underscore _
the underscore is pretty simple, it just italicizes text. so _ITALICS!_ looks like ITALICS!
the backslash is more complicated. it escapes characters, witch means that the character after a backslash won't be treated like a formatting character, even if it normally is one. so \_this\_ looks like _this_.
in the worse looking shrug emoticon, the backslash is escaping the opening bracket (which doesn't need to be escaped, but it is anyway) so it doesn't show up itself.
thus, the best way to write the shrug emoticon is ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯
it looks strange, but when formatted, it looks just like this:
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
footnote: there might also be a way to do this with <style tags> but I don't know how.
another footnote: or you could just do ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (as preformatted text)