Markdown Table Formatter

What This Tool Does

Markdown tables get messy fast — especially after manual edits, merges, or copy-paste. Columns drift out of alignment, outer pipes go missing, and separator rows stop matching the header. This formatter parses each table and rewrites it as clean, valid GitHub-Flavored Markdown with perfectly aligned columns, without touching any of the surrounding text.

How to Use It

1. Paste your Markdown — a single table or an entire document.
2. Choose your options: pretty alignment, alignment colons, and minimum column width.
3. Review the reformatted output in Markdown or Preview.
4. Copy or download the result. The footer reports how many tables were reformatted.

What It Normalizes

• Column alignment in the raw source via monospace-aware cell padding (including wide CJK characters).
• Separator rows rebuilt to match the header's column count and alignment.
• Outer pipes added so every row is consistently delimited.
• Ragged rows padded with empty cells to keep the table rectangular.
• Escaping of pipe characters inside cell values so they don't break the table.

Pretty vs Compact

Pretty mode pads every cell so the columns line up vertically in the raw Markdown — ideal for documents people read and edit in a plain text editor. Compact mode uses single-space padding, producing the smallest possible source, which keeps version-control diffs tight when a table changes. Pick whichever fits your workflow.

Common Use Cases

• Cleanup before commit: tidy tables in a README or docs file before pushing.
• Post-merge fixes: realign tables mangled by a merge or rebase.
• Imported content: normalize tables pasted from other tools.
• Consistency: enforce a single table style across a documentation set.

Tips

• Run the formatter as a final pass before committing Markdown docs.
• Use compact mode in repositories where you care about minimal diffs.
• Combine with the Markdown Formatter tool to normalize the rest of the document too.