What LaTeX is
A LaTeX table is a tabular environment: a column specification, ampersands between cells and double backslashes at the end of each row.
Academic papers, theses and anything typeset with LaTeX or written in Overleaf.
What Ruby is
A Ruby array of hashes with symbol keys.
Rails seed files and Ruby scripts.
What changes when you convert LaTeX to Ruby
The tabular body is read, rules are dropped, and escaped characters are unescaped. Text wrapped in textbf or emph is reduced to the text itself.
Column names are converted to valid symbol names, which means non-word characters become underscores.
What carries over from LaTeX to Ruby
LaTeX records 2 things about a table that Ruby has no way to hold.
Ruby wants a type for each column, and LaTeX does not record one, so each column is typed from what its values look like. A column of digits that should stay text - a zip code, a phone number, a leading-zero id - is the usual thing to check afterwards.
Ruby has no header row. The column names are repeated as keys on every record instead, which is why the result is bigger on disk than the table it came from.
Anything visual in the LaTeX - weight, alignment, colour, column widths - has no counterpart in Ruby and is dropped. The values are what survives.
This is the direction that recovers structure: LaTeX has no table in it to read, only an arrangement that looks like one, so the rows and columns are inferred rather than read.
The identifier 007 comes out of the Ruby 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 Ruby file goes wrong.
The quotes around Jonah "Jo" Pryce are left as a plain quote character in the Ruby.