Convert Markdown to ASCII Table Online

Paste a Markdown table below, edit it if you need to, and get ASCII Table back. The conversion runs in your browser, so nothing is uploaded, there is no size limit and there is no signup.

From

From a page

The only part of this site that uses a server. The address is sent to it so the page can be fetched, because a browser is not allowed to fetch someone else's page itself. Your own files are never involved.

Nothing here is uploaded. The parsing happens on this page.

Edit

Paste or upload something above and it will appear here.

ToDataMarkupDocumentsCodeSchemasImages

Header rowDetect numbers

The output will appear here once there is a table to convert.

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 ASCII Table is

An ASCII table is a grid drawn with plus signs, dashes and pipes. It renders identically in every terminal and every font.

Command line output, code comments, plain text email and commit messages.

What changes when you convert Markdown to ASCII 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.

Column widths are measured in display columns rather than characters, so a table with CJK or emoji content still lines up.

What carries over from Markdown to ASCII Table

ASCII table can express everything Markdown holds about a table, so this conversion is about shape rather than loss.

Markdown and ASCII 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. An ASCII table is drawn with dashes and pipes for a terminal or a code comment, and its borders are decoration rather than delimiters.

That makes this a change of notation rather than of content: the same values, the same columns, the same order, written with the markers ASCII table expects instead of the ones Markdown uses.

The identifier 007 comes out of the ASCII 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 ASCII Table file goes wrong.

The quotes around Jonah "Jo" Pryce are left as a plain quote character in the ASCII Table.

A worked example

Three rows of staff data, with an identifier that has a leading zero, a value containing a comma, a value containing quotes and one blank cell. Those are the four places formats disagree, so they are the four places to look.

Markdown in

| id  | name             | role          | started    | hours |
| --- | ---------------- | ------------- | ---------- | ----- |
| 007 | Halima Yusuf     | Analyst, data | 2024-03-15 | 38.5  |
| 012 | Jonah "Jo" Pryce | Engineer      | 2025-11-02 |       |
| 104 | Wei Chen         | Manager       | 2023-06-30 | 40    |

ASCII Table out

+-----+------------------+---------------+------------+-------+
| id  | name             | role          | started    | hours |
+-----+------------------+---------------+------------+-------+
| 007 | Halima Yusuf     | Analyst, data | 2024-03-15 | 38.5  |
| 012 | Jonah "Jo" Pryce | Engineer      | 2025-11-02 |       |
| 104 | Wei Chen         | Manager       | 2023-06-30 | 40    |
+-----+------------------+---------------+------------+-------+

Questions

How do I convert Markdown to ASCII Table?

Paste your Markdown into the box above or drop the file onto it. Check the table in the grid, then copy or download the ASCII Table from the output panel. It takes one step and the data never leaves your browser.

Can a Markdown table cell contain a line break?

Not directly. The row ends at the newline. Use a <br> tag inside the cell, which every common Markdown renderer passes through to the HTML output.

Is there a limit on file size?

No. The work happens on your own machine, so the limit is your machine's memory rather than an upload cap. A file with tens of thousands of rows converts in a second or two.

Is my data uploaded anywhere?

No. The parsing and generating are done by JavaScript running on this page. You can watch the network tab while you convert and see that nothing is sent.