What HTML is
An HTML table is a table element containing thead and tbody, with th cells for headers and td cells for data.
Web pages, email templates and anything pasted into a CMS.
What Jira is
Jira wiki markup uses double pipes for header cells and single pipes for data cells.
Jira issues, comments and descriptions.
What changes when you convert HTML to Jira
The first table in the markup is used. Cell contents are stripped of inline tags and entities are decoded, so <td><b>Total</b> </td> arrives as Total. Nested tables inside a cell are not descended into.
Empty cells are filled with a single space, because a Jira row with two adjacent pipes collapses the column and shifts everything after it.
What carries over from HTML to Jira
HTML records 3 things about a table that Jira has no way to hold.
HTML can hold a value that is itself a list or an object. Jira has only flat cells, so nested values are flattened into one cell rather than being spread across columns.
A line break inside a cell ends the row in Jira, so line breaks are replaced rather than carried through.
Anything visual in the HTML - weight, alignment, colour, column widths - has no counterpart in Jira and is dropped. The values are what survives.
The identifier 007 comes out of the Jira as 007. Reading it as a number would have made it 7, and an id that changes value is worse than one that stays text.
The role "Analyst, data" survives with its comma, in one cell rather than split across two. That is the first thing to check in any converted table, and the usual place a Jira file goes wrong.
The quotes around Jonah "Jo" Pryce are left as a plain quote character in the Jira.