Please can we have markdown tables on dba.se

Question

Several sites have MathJax enabled, so there is obviously some room for site-specific markdown.

Therefore please can we have markdown tables here on dba.se? There is an open feature-request for this on mSO, but whereas it is hardly a key feature for a programming Q&A site, a significant percentage of our questions and answers contain tabular sample data, and real tables will make them neater and easier to read.

All we can do now is use ascii art but this has a number of drawbacks.

If the feature request goes through I'm pretty sure Jake Feasel will be happy to tweak SQL Fiddle to make it produce compatible markdown.

-- edit:

I've discovered that MathJax isn't implemented as a markdown extension after all, it is a script that runs on the page. Apparently the 'Go' board game site had it's own code as well for displaying board positions, but I'm not sure whether that was markdown or a script.

Anyway, this feature-request is specifically for a markdown extension, the script in my answer is just to prove the principle. We'd settle for a Javascript solution if that's the only thing on offer though!

Answer 1

status-itshappening

We're rolling out markdown support for tables here and on Meta Stack Exchange. Full details are in this announcement on MSE. Please play around with the feature and let us know if we missed anything over on Meta Stack Exchange.

Here's the roll-out plan (and a table for you to look at!)

What?	When?	Where?
Table support	2020-11-23	Meta Stack Exchange & DBA Meta
More table support	week of 2020-11-30	DBA Stack Exchange
Even more table support	week of 2020-12-07	Network-wide launch (if no major issues found)

Have fun!

Answer 2

a table:

|Item    |Value|
|--------|----:|
|Computer|$1600|
|Phone   |  $12|
|Pipe    |   $1|

---

a wide table:

|Item    |Value|
|--------|----:|
|Computer|$1600000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000|
|Phone   |  $12|
|Pipe    |   $1|

---

a table and a wide table:

|Item    |Value|
|--------|----:|
|Computer|$1600|
|Phone   |  $12|
|Pipe    |   $1|

|Item    |Value|
|--------|----:|
|Computer|$1600000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000|
|Phone   |  $12|
|Pipe    |   $1|

I've added this table as part of a plan to develop a userscript demo-ing the result.

For now, try this on the browser console (tested on Firefox only):

$('div.post-text>pre').each(function(){ $(this).children().html($(this).children().html().replace(/(^\|.*\|$\n)+/gm,function(match){ var index = 0; return '<table style="margin: 0.5em; table-layout: fixed; font-size: smaller; background-color: white; box-shadow: 2px 2px 6px #777;">'+match.replace(/^(.*)$/gm,function(match){ var cell='th'; index++; if(index===2){ return ''; } if(index>2){ cell='td'; } return '<tr>'+match.replace(/^\|/,'<'+cell+'>').replace(/\|$/,'</'+cell+'>').replace(/\|/,'</'+cell+'><'+cell+'>')+'<tr>'; })+'</table>'; })); }).find('td,th').css('border','1px solid black').css('padding','2px').each(function(){ $(this).text($(this).text().replace(/^\s+|\s+$/g, '')); }).filter('th').css('background-color', '#eee')

This is just to prove the principle and I don't expect it to be robust. It's also missing features like justification at the moment.

Here's a screenshot of the output for those who can't run the script:

Answer 3

An alternative, not so nice but simpler, would be to have css line-height: 1 set for code blocks (.post-text pre { line-height: 1; }) on dba.se.

Unicode tables like this would then not have broken lines:

values ('Donald Duck')
     , ('Micky Mouse');

┌─────────────┐
│   column1   │
├─────────────┤
│ Donald Duck │
│ Micky Mouse │
└─────────────┘

so they would look like this:

The lines of code are squashed together now, but I don't think it looks worse, maybe even an improvement.

Answer 4

At this point we have no plans to extend Markdown syntax to support tables. The extension itself isn't the hard part. The display of tables in posts would be fairly hard to get right.

There are a few extensions already (like what PHP Markdown does), but the syntax isn't very intuitive, and it's very easy to start breaking page layout with tables, nested tables, and so on.

I think the userscript Jack started working on is a step in the right direction, but it doesn't seem to make tables significantly prettier or easier to read than their raw ASCII versions.

My advice for now is to continue developing your script if you think it's necessary. Get it to the point where many people are using it, and we can see about integrating it into the site itself.

---

Update (March 2016): we are using CommonMark for topics and examples created in Documentation. The CommonMark parser we have does include table support and we have talked about eventually switching Q&A over to it as well some time after Documentation leaves private beta. However, unfortunately at the moment I don't have anything that even resembles an ETA.

---

Update (November 2020): We are now testing table support!