Markdown Table Generator

GitHub Flavored Markdown tables are: a header row of pipe-separated cells, a separator row of dashes with optional colons for alignment, and one or more data rows. The separator row determines whether tables render — without it, the renderer treats the lines as paragraphs.

| Column A | Column B | Column C |
|----------|:--------:|---------:|
| left     |  center  |    right |
| more     |   data   |     here |

Alignment colons in the separator row: :--- left, :---: center, ---: right, --- default (usually left). Column widths in source do not need to match — the renderer aligns based on the longest cell, not the visual whitespace.

• Literal pipes in cells — escape with backslash: \|. Or wrap the table in an HTML <table> if you have many pipes (think SQL queries as cell content).
• Multi-line cells — not supported in basic GFM. Use <br> for visible line breaks inside a cell, or fall back to HTML <table> with <td> containing block elements.
• Empty cells — write at least a space between pipes: | | |. Markdown renderers treat the consecutive pipes as table-cell-boundary errors otherwise.
• Cells with leading/trailing whitespace — preserved by some renderers, trimmed by others. Do not depend on it for alignment; use the separator-row colon syntax.
• Header-row alignment — alignment in the separator row applies to the data rows AND the header. If you want a left-aligned header above right-aligned data, you cannot — GFM has one alignment per column.
• Tables nested inside lists — supported by GFM since 2020 but rendered inconsistently across viewers. If you must, ensure the table starts on a new line aligned to the list-item indent.

• You are writing a README and need to compare versions, features, or pricing tiers in a table without hand-counting dashes.
• You inherited a CSV of API endpoints and want it as a markdown table for the docs site.
• You are pasting from a spreadsheet (Numbers, Excel, Google Sheets) and need consistent markdown output, not the awful HTML those apps emit.
• You are normalizing a long markdown table that someone hand-wrote — re-padding the cells for readable diffs.

• It will not produce tables with merged cells (rowspan / colspan). Markdown has no syntax for it. Use HTML if you need merged cells.
• It will not auto-style. Color, borders, hover states are CSS concerns. The rendered HTML inherits the site's table styling.
• It will not preserve the structure when round-tripping through every renderer. CommonMark-strict viewers (some npm registries) ignore tables entirely. For maximum portability, fall back to definition lists or paragraphs.