markdown-table

Generate fancy Markdown tables.

Install

This package is ESM only: Node 12+ is needed to use it and it must be imported instead of required.

npm:

npm install markdown-table

Use

Typical usage (defaults to align left):

import {markdownTable} from 'markdown-table'

markdownTable([
  ['Branch', 'Commit'],
  ['main', '0123456789abcdef'],
  ['staging', 'fedcba9876543210']
])

Yields:

| Branch  | Commit           |
| ------- | ---------------- |
| main    | 0123456789abcdef |
| staging | fedcba9876543210 |

With align:

markdownTable(
  [
    ['Beep', 'No.', 'Boop'],
    ['beep', '1024', 'xyz'],
    ['boop', '3388450', 'tuv'],
    ['foo', '10106', 'qrstuv'],
    ['bar', '45', 'lmno']
  ],
  {align: ['l', 'c', 'r']}
)

Yields:

| Beep |   No.   |   Boop |
| :--- | :-----: | -----: |
| beep |   1024  |    xyz |
| boop | 3388450 |    tuv |
| foo  |  10106  | qrstuv |
| bar  |    45   |   lmno |

API

This package exports the following identifiers: markdownTable. There is no default export.

markdownTable(table[, options])

Turns a given matrix of strings (an array of arrays of strings) into a table.

options

options.align

One style for all columns, or styles for their respective columns (string or string[]). Each style is either 'l' (left), 'r' (right), or 'c' (center). Other values are treated as '', which doesn’t place the colon in the alignment row but does align left. Only the lowercased first character is used, so Right is fine.

options.padding

Whether to add a space of padding between delimiters and cells (boolean, default: true).

When true, there is padding:

| Alpha | B     |
| ----- | ----- |
| C     | Delta |

When false, there is no padding:

|Alpha|B    |
|-----|-----|
|C    |Delta|

options.delimiterStart

Whether to begin each row with the delimiter (boolean, default: true).

Note: please don’t use this: it could create fragile structures that aren’t understandable to some Markdown parsers.

When true, there are starting delimiters:

| Alpha | B     |
| ----- | ----- |
| C     | Delta |

When false, there are no starting delimiters:

Alpha | B     |
----- | ----- |
C     | Delta |

options.delimiterEnd

Whether to end each row with the delimiter (boolean, default: true).

Note: please don’t use this: it could create fragile structures that aren’t understandable to some Markdown parsers.

When true, there are ending delimiters:

| Alpha | B     |
| ----- | ----- |
| C     | Delta |

When false, there are no ending delimiters:

| Alpha | B
| ----- | -----
| C     | Delta

options.alignDelimiters

Whether to align the delimiters (boolean, default: true). By default, they are aligned:

| Alpha | B     |
| ----- | ----- |
| C     | Delta |

Pass false to make them staggered:

| Alpha | B |
| - | - |
| C | Delta |

options.stringLength

Method to detect the length of a cell (Function, default: s => s.length).

Full-width characters and ANSI-sequences all mess up delimiter alignment when viewing the Markdown source. To fix this, you have to pass in a stringLength option to detect the “visible” length of a cell (note that what is and isn’t visible depends on your editor).

Without such a function, the following:

markdownTable([
  ['Alpha', 'Bravo'],
  ['中文', 'Charlie'],
  ['👩‍❤️‍👩', 'Delta']
])

Yields:

| Alpha | Bravo |
| - | - |
| 中文 | Charlie |
| 👩‍❤️‍👩 | Delta |

With string-width:

import stringWidth from 'string-width'

markdownTable(
  [
    ['Alpha', 'Bravo'],
    ['中文', 'Charlie'],
    ['👩‍❤️‍👩', 'Delta']
  ],
  {stringLength: width}
)

Yields:

| Alpha | Bravo   |
| ----- | ------- |
| 中文  | Charlie |
| 👩‍❤️‍👩    | Delta   |

Inspiration

The original idea and basic implementation was inspired by James Halliday’s text-table library.

License

MIT © Titus Wormer