What JSON Lines is
JSON Lines is one complete JSON object per line, with no enclosing array and no commas between records. The file is not valid JSON as a whole, and that is the point.
Log pipelines, machine learning datasets and anything that appends records or reads them in a stream.
What Markdown is
A Markdown table is rows of pipe-separated cells with a dashed rule under the header. Alignment is set by placing colons in that rule.
README files, GitHub issues, documentation sites, Obsidian and Notion.
What changes when you convert JSON Lines to Markdown
Each line is parsed on its own, so a corrupt record does not take the file with it. Keys are unioned across lines in first-seen order, so a record missing a field leaves that cell empty rather than shifting the columns.
Cells are padded so the source lines up in a plain text editor, pipes inside values are escaped, and line breaks inside a cell become <br> because a Markdown table row cannot span lines.
What carries over from JSON Lines to Markdown
JSON Lines records 3 things about a table that Markdown has no way to hold.
JSON Lines distinguishes a number from the text of a number; Markdown does not, so every value arrives as text and has to be re-parsed by whatever reads it next.
An empty cell and a missing one are the same thing in Markdown, so a null and an empty string in the JSON Lines both come out blank and can no longer be told apart.
JSON Lines can hold a value that is itself a list or an object. Markdown has only flat cells, so nested values are flattened into one cell rather than being spread across columns.
Markdown marks header cells differently from data cells, so the keys are lifted out and written once as a marked header row rather than repeated on every row.
The identifier 007 comes out of the Markdown 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 Markdown file goes wrong.
The quotes around Jonah "Jo" Pryce are left as a plain quote character in the Markdown.