Convert Plain Text to ASCII Table Online

Paste a Plain Text 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 Plain Text is

Plain text here means columns lined up with spaces, the way a command line tool prints a table.

Terminal output, log files, fixed-width exports from older systems.

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 Plain Text to ASCII Table

Two shapes are handled. If the same character positions are blank on every line, those gutters are treated as column boundaries, so values containing single spaces stay intact. Otherwise the lines are split on runs of whitespace.

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 Plain Text to ASCII Table

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

ASCII table marks its header cells differently from its data cells, so the first row is written with that marker.

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.

Plain Text 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 Plain Text to ASCII Table?

Paste your Plain Text 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.

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.