How can I manually add italics or underlines to code listings using minted?

Question

I'm a new user of minted, and I have a LaTeX fragment that looks like this:

\begin{minted}{python}
`s` = input(`prompt`)
\end{minted}

I was previously using the listings package:

\begin{lstlisting}
`s` = input(`prompt`)
\end{lstlisting}

In that package (with appropriate settings), the effect of the single back-quotes was to italicize the code between them, as follows:

At least using the default settings, this doesn't work in minted. Is it possible to achieve the same effect using single-character delimiters? If not, what would be the simplest command to use instead?

The purpose is to distinguish between actual code and placeholder arguments or variables.

EDIT: In addition, I would like to be able to underline snippets of code within longer lines, so answers that address both needs (underlining and italicizing) would be appreciated.

Answer 1

Since posting the above, I found the escapeinside option, which allows the following:

\begin{minted}[escapeinside=||]{python}
|\emph{s}| = input(|\emph{prompt}|)
\end{minted}

This sort of works, but it appears to override the color assigned by minted, and it requires much messier code than I would like.

In short, a solution, but not as nice as I'd like. Also, while it works in the vast majority of case, it occasionally fails for reasons I don't understand: