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 TOML is
TOML is a configuration format with explicit types and a table syntax, designed to be unambiguous where YAML is clever.
Rust and Python projects, and anything with a pyproject.toml or Cargo.toml.
What changes when you convert Markdown to TOML
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.
Each row becomes an entry in an array of tables. Keys are sanitised to bare keys where possible and quoted where not.
What carries over from Markdown to TOML
Markdown records 2 things about a table that TOML has no way to hold.
TOML 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.
TOML 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 Markdown - weight, alignment, colour, column widths - has no counterpart in TOML and is dropped. The values are what survives.
The identifier 007 comes out of the TOML 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 TOML file goes wrong.
The quotes around Jonah "Jo" Pryce are escaped with a backslash in the TOML.