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 XML is
XML marks up data with nested named tags and optional attributes. It is verbose, strict about being well-formed, and can carry a schema that says what shape a document must have.
Enterprise integrations, government data feeds, RSS, SOAP services and older document formats.
What changes when you convert LaTeX to XML
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.
Each row becomes an element with one child per column. Header names are rewritten where they have to be, because an XML tag cannot start with a digit or contain a space, so a column called 2024 Sales becomes _2024_Sales.
What carries over from LaTeX to XML
LaTeX records 2 things about a table that XML has no way to hold.
XML 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 XML 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 XML 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 XML file goes wrong.
The quotes around Jonah "Jo" Pryce are written as the HTML entity " in the XML.