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 Box-Drawing Table is
The same grid as an ASCII table, drawn with Unicode box-drawing characters instead of punctuation.
Terminal UIs and documentation where the output is known to be UTF-8.
What changes when you convert Markdown to Box-Drawing Table
Leading and trailing pipes are optional and both are handled. A pipe the author escaped with a backslash is read as data rather than a column break, which is the usual reason a hand-written table parses one column too wide.
Prettier than plus signs, and safe anywhere the reader's font has the box-drawing block, which is almost everywhere in 2026.
What carries over from Markdown to Box-Drawing Table
box-drawing table can express everything Markdown holds about a table, so this conversion is about shape rather than loss.
Markdown and box-drawing table can express the same things about a table, so nothing is lost here - only rewritten. A pipe table is one row per line, so a line break inside a cell ends the row early. A box-drawing table is an ASCII table drawn with Unicode box characters, so it needs a UTF-8 terminal to line up.
That makes this a change of notation rather than of content: the same values, the same columns, the same order, written with the markers box-drawing table expects instead of the ones Markdown uses.
The identifier 007 comes out of the Box-Drawing Table 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 Box-Drawing Table file goes wrong.
The quotes around Jonah "Jo" Pryce are left as a plain quote character in the Box-Drawing Table.