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 MATLAB is
MATLAB cell arrays combined into a table with the table() function.
Engineering and research code.
What changes when you convert Markdown to MATLAB
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.
One cell array per column, then a single table() call. Column names are sanitised to valid variable names.
What carries over from Markdown to MATLAB
One property of the Markdown has no home in MATLAB, and it is worth knowing which before you convert.
MATLAB wants a type for each column, and Markdown 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.
Anything visual in the Markdown - weight, alignment, colour, column widths - has no counterpart in MATLAB and is dropped. The values are what survives.
The identifier 007 comes out of the MATLAB 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 MATLAB file goes wrong.
The quotes around Jonah "Jo" Pryce are left as a plain quote character in the MATLAB.