Personalization functions: literal
The literal function is used to take a block of code literally. It is particularly useful when you want to include a block that contains many curly braces Smarty would otherwise try to interpret. Javascript code contains many curly braces for example and individually escaping curly braces might be very tedious if you want to send a longer snippet of code.
In a simpler case of escaping only two curly brackets it might not be necessary to use the literal block. In this case you could use the ldelim and rdelim functions to output the brackets instead. In Smarty 3 it is also possible to just place spaces around a bracket to output it as a symbol.
Example
To use the literal function, simply place what you want to be taken
literally between the begin tag ({literal}) and end tag ({\literal}).
<script>
// These braces would be automatically escaped in Smarty 3
// because of the whitespace
function myFoo {
alert('Foo!');
}
// This is a good place to use the literal block
// to escape while keeping the function readable.
{literal}
function myBar {alert('Bar!');}
{/literal}
</script>This example was taken from the Smarty documentation.