Textile marks header cells with |_. and data cells with plain pipes.
Who uses it
Redmine, and older Rails applications.
Writing Textile
The header row is written with the |_. marker so it renders as a header.
What is Textile?
What it can hold
Textile is a markup language. Header cells are marked with |_. and everything else is a plain pipe. 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.
What it looks like
|_. 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 Textile files?
Textile is written by Tablizer rather than read by it. Open the file in whichever tool the format belongs to.
Is Textile a good format for sharing data?
It depends who is receiving it. Redmine, and older Rails applications. If the recipient is outside that group, a plain CSV travels further than anything else.