What is ASCII Table?

An ASCII table is a grid drawn with plus signs, dashes and pipes. It renders identically in every terminal and every font.

Who uses it

Command line output, code comments, plain text email and commit messages.

Writing ASCII Table

Column widths are measured in display columns rather than characters, so a table with CJK or emoji content still lines up.

What it can hold

ASCII table is a delimited text format. An ASCII table is drawn with dashes and pipes for a terminal or a code comment, and its borders are decoration rather than delimiters. A machine can read it back, but only by following the conventions rather than a rule the format enforces.

It keeps

A header that is marked as one, rather than being the first row by convention.

It cannot express

Types. Every value is text. A column of digits is indistinguishable from a column of numbers until something downstream decides to read it as one, which is where a leading zero usually disappears.
A null. An absent value and an empty one look the same, and nothing in the file says which was meant.
Nesting. Cells are flat, so structured values have to be flattened into extra columns or written into one cell as text.
A line break inside a cell. One would end the row, so it has to be replaced before writing.
A partial read. The document has to be complete to mean anything, so a truncated file yields nothing and a large one has to be held in memory whole.

What it looks like

Example ASCII Table

+-----+------------------+---------------+------------+-------+
| id  | name             | role          | started    | hours |
+-----+------------------+---------------+------------+-------+
| 007 | Halima Yusuf     | Analyst, data | 2024-03-15 | 38.5  |
| 012 | Jonah "Jo" Pryce | Engineer      | 2025-11-02 |       |
| 104 | Wei Chen         | Manager       | 2023-06-30 | 40    |
+-----+------------------+---------------+------------+-------+

Questions

How do I open ASCII Table files?

ASCII Table is written by Tablizer rather than read by it. Open the file in whichever tool the format belongs to.

Is ASCII Table a good format for sharing data?

It depends who is receiving it. Command line output, code comments, plain text email and commit messages. If the recipient is outside that group, a plain CSV travels further than anything else.