Template:Encodefirst/doc

This template replaces the first character of the argument with its HTML entity if it is one of four wiki markup characters. This can sometimes fix the issue at Help:Template where a character may be processed as though it were at the beginning of a line.

Examples
The output looks like the input whether a character is replaced or not.

produces:

But the output will behave differently from the input in some situations where it is processed. For example, la fails as of August 2017 if its argument starts with.

causes the asterisk to be processed as list markup and produces broken display.

works correctly: