Markdown Table Generator

Markdown tables and their alignment

A Markdown table is rows of cells separated by pipes, with a divider row of dashes under the header. Colons in that divider control alignment: a colon on the left aligns left, on the right aligns right, and on both sides centers the column. Building one by hand is tedious to keep aligned, which is why a generator earns its place.

The divider row does the work

The second line is not decoration; it is required and it carries the alignment. :--- is left, ---: is right, and :---: is centered. The number of dashes does not matter to parsers, though keeping them padded makes the raw source readable.

Example

| Name  | Role      | Score |
| :---- | :-------: | ----: |
| Ada   | Engineer  |    98 |
| Grace | Compiler  |   100 |

Here the first column is left-aligned, the role is centered, and the numeric score is right-aligned so the digits line up by place value, which is the right call for numbers.

Pitfalls

A literal pipe inside a cell breaks the table; escape it as \|. Markdown tables cannot span cells or nest block content like lists and code fences, so a complex layout needs raw HTML instead. The visual alignment of the raw source has no effect on output, only the colons do. For a longer document, generate section links with the Markdown TOC generator.

FAQ

Why does my table render as plain text? Tables are a GitHub Flavored Markdown extension; a strict CommonMark renderer without it will not parse them. Also check that the divider row is present.

Can cells contain formatting? Inline formatting like bold, code, and links works. Block-level content does not.

Do columns need equal widths in the source? No. The renderer sizes columns from content; padding the source is purely for human readability.