single word requests - Formal way of saying "blah blah blah" or "........" to indicate generic filler or omissions in a document when providing examples

In my specific case, I'm writing a tutorial on how to format a list of items. Now I would usually say etc. , but in my mind you can only use etc. following a statement, rather than proceeding it.

So I would be happy to when addressing how "thing1", "thing2" and "thing3" should be formatted, say that the finished product should look like:

{
thing1
thing2
thing3
etc.
}

But to my mind, when addressing things 24-26,

{
etc.
thing24
thing25
thing26
etc.
}

doesn't seem right.

Is there a short latin word or other more formal convention that fills the gap I'm looking for? Rather than resorting to:

{
blah blah blah
thing24
thing25
thing26
etc.
}

Which isn't that professional.

Of course in many cases it's possible to get around this by just not giving such an example, but this is interesting to me as a general question as well as to solve a specific problem.