# Protected Region A protected region is a span that a parser deliberately excludes from ordinary recognition rules. Documentation for Atomic Markdown contains literal brace grammar that would otherwise be extracted as live content. Fenced code blocks and inline code spans must therefore be masked before quotation parsing and restored afterward. Related: [[wiki/Atomic Markdown|Atomic Markdown]], [[wiki/Regular Expression|Regular Expression]], [[wiki/Dual-Surface Validation|Dual-Surface Validation]], [[wiki/Multi-Pass Processing|Multi-Pass Processing]].