Trac wiki tables use double pipes around every cell.
Who uses it
Projects still running a Trac instance.
Writing Trac Wiki
Every cell is wrapped in double pipes, which is the whole syntax.
What is Trac Wiki?
What it can hold
Trac wiki is a wiki syntax. Rows are written between double pipes, with an equals sign marking a header cell. 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 Trac Wiki files?
Trac Wiki is written by Tablizer rather than read by it. Open the file in whichever tool the format belongs to.
Is Trac Wiki a good format for sharing data?
It depends who is receiving it. Projects still running a Trac instance. If the recipient is outside that group, a plain CSV travels further than anything else.