recommonmark will never support table, what can I do

[leniy]

I know recommonmark will never support table , cause this is a major feature than markdown , to let people to use rst.

So,is there any other Parser for sphinx to use ?

[maxgrenderjones]

Seems like a situation where AutoStructify should help - use the eval_rst directive to get it to output a table specified using rst format, i.e.

```eval_rst
+------------+------------+-----------+ 
| Header 1   | Header 2   | Header 3  | 
+============+============+===========+ 
| body row 1 | column 2   | column 3  | 
+------------+------------+-----------+ 
| body row 2 | Cells may span columns.| 
+------------+------------+-----------+ 
```

[leniy]

@maxgrenderjones
thx, and btw, how to figure out the table's boundary, cause each time I add some words to a table, I need to add lots of ---- and ==== manually.

[leniy]

Are there any automation tools?

[asmeurer]

Emacs has some tools to edit ASCII tables (https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Text-Based-Tables.html)

But if you are just writing a simple n x m table where no cells extend beyond their width or hight, it's much easier to use a list table (also goes in an eval_rst block).

Or, alternately, you can write the table in pure HTML, since Markdown supports HTML directly inline.

[aborruso]

Hi @leniy I have solved using https://github.com/ryanfox/sphinx-markdown-tables

[leniy]

@aborruso ,yes,@ryanfox 's tool is very useful.

[clayrisser]

@aborruso, (sphinx-markdown-tables)[https://github.com/ryanfox/sphinx-markdown-tables] is not true sphinx/docutils table support. It simply converts the tables to html tables. This creates major issues when writing custom sphinx builders/writers.

For example when building the sphinx-markdown-builder, I walk the docutils tree to build markdown tables. However, this fails to work with an html table. So, I have to build a custom exception that detects html tables to convert it to a markdown table. This is certainly not ideal, because someone might explicitly define their table in html and want it kept in html. In summary, html tables should be separate from a docutils table, and recommonmark should build a docutils table from markdown tables to ensure this separation.

Sadly, the commonmark python module does not support parsing markdown tables. It has been suggested to rebuild the recommonmark parser to use the Markdown python module. This parser supports extensions and has a very solid extension for parsing markdown tables.

I have created a pull request to add the Markdown parser.
#138

It not only enables full markdown support using the Markdown python module but also opens the door for more features supported by the Markdown modules various extensions.

I have ensured the pull request is fully backward compatible with the CommonMark parser.

In order to use the Markdown parser this pull request implements, you have to explicitly set the parser property in the recommonmark_config to Markdown.

    app.add_config_value('recommonmark_config', {
        'parser': 'Markdown'
    }, True)

You can see my code at the link below.
https://github.com/codejamninja/recommonmark/tree/codejamninja/python-markdown

[simonsan]

@aborruso Link worked very well! Thanks!