How to escape square brackets?

[Dave Hicks]

By the way, just typing a [b] shouldn't be a problem. ie

Press [B] to start

a[b] = j[i];

I didn't do anything special on these. Simple code-like references to [b] etc. work simply because I didn't use any closing tags. As long as you don't mix corresponding text formatting into the same post, they'll work without modifications. If you do want to use them along with bold and italic in the same post, then you'll want to sprinkle in the zero width spaces.