Fix issue with dollar sign $ formatting in Colab to HTML conversion

(As of June, 2025) When using Google Colab, dollar signs $ are a special character that are interpreted to mean that you are formatting text as a math formula. A single dollar sign may display correctly but more than one dollar sign in a cell triggers the formatting. This can be incredibly frustrating and there does not appear to be a way to disable this behavior.

The solution is to “escape” the dollar sign $ with a backslash \ so it looks like this in a markdown cell: \$

This will cause it to render correctly in Colab. If that’s all you need, you’re good to go! However, if you need to convert the Colab notebook to an HTML file there can be additional issues with the conversion process interpreting those escaped dollar signs \$ as formula formatting!

Here is the solution: wrap every \$ in an HTML span tag so it looks like this in the markdown: <span>\$</span>

Here’s everything I tried for reference. Span tags around the escaped dollar signs (either individually or around the entire text) are the only thing that works in both Colab and HTML.

Markdown	Works in Colab?	Works in HTML?
HTML span tag around backslash dollar sign	YES	YES

span tag around the whole text with backslash dollar sign	Yes	Yes

Backticks	Yes, but it’s formatted as code	Yes, but it’s formatted as code

Plain dollar signs	No	No

Double dollar signs	No. Very much no.	No

Backslash dollar signs	Yes	No, interpreted as formula formatting

Double backslash dollar signs	No	Yes

No space before or after dollar sign	Yes, but often not feasible to have characters in front of the dollar sign	No

HTML &dollar; character	Yes	No

HTML $ character	Yes	No

dollar backslash dollar dollar	Yes - dollar sign looks weird but passable in colab	No

Screenshot of the HTML output for reference: