Convert Markdown to XML Online

Paste a Markdown table below, edit it if you need to, and get XML 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 numbersRootRow

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 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 Markdown to XML

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 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 Markdown to XML

Markdown 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 Markdown - weight, alignment, colour, column widths - has no counterpart in XML and is dropped. The values are what survives.

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.

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    |

XML out

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<staff>
  <row>
    <id>007</id>
    <name>Halima Yusuf</name>
    <role>Analyst, data</role>
    <started>2024-03-15</started>
    <hours>38.5</hours>
  </row>
  <row>
    <id>012</id>
    <name>Jonah &quot;Jo&quot; Pryce</name>
    <role>Engineer</role>
    <started>2025-11-02</started>
    <hours></hours>
  </row>
  <row>
    <id>104</id>
    <name>Wei Chen</name>
    <role>Manager</role>
    <started>2023-06-30</started>
    <hours>40</hours>
  </row>
</staff>

Questions

How do I convert Markdown to XML?

Paste your Markdown into the box above or drop the file onto it. Check the table in the grid, then copy or download the XML 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.