Create a table without a header in reStructuredText and Markdown

Koen Vervloesem

2020-08-11 19:08

Have you ever written a table without a header in Markdown? It turns out that most Markdown parsers don't support tables without headers.

When I wrote the page about my book Control Your Home with Raspberry Pi on this website, I wanted to list some specifications (title, publication date, number of pages, ...) in a table without a header. In reStructuredText, which I'm using for this website, the code for the table looks like this:

+----------------------+-------------------------------------+
| **Title**            | Control Your Home with Raspberry Pi |
+----------------------+-------------------------------------+
| **Author**           | Koen Vervloesem                     |
+----------------------+-------------------------------------+
| **Publication date** | 2020-08-17                          |
+----------------------+-------------------------------------+
| **Number of pages**  | 331                                 |
+----------------------+-------------------------------------+
| **Price**            | € 37.50                             |
+----------------------+-------------------------------------+
| **ISBN-13**          | 978-1-907920-94-3                   |
+----------------------+-------------------------------------+
| **ISBN-10**          | 1-907920-94-3                       |
+----------------------+-------------------------------------+
| **Publisher**        | Elektor International Media (EIM)   |
+----------------------+-------------------------------------+

This is rendered by Nikola, the static site generator I'm using, as:

Title	Control Your Home with Raspberry Pi
Author	Koen Vervloesem
Publication date	2020-08-17
Number of pages	331
Price	€ 37.50
ISBN-13	978-1-907920-94-3
ISBN-10	1-907920-94-3
Publisher	Elektor International Media (EIM)

This looks fine as a simple table without a header.

Now I wanted to do the same in Markdown in the corresponding GitHub repository with code examples. I could have written the README as a reStructuredText file, but I already created a README.md out of habit, so I tried to create the same table without header in Markdown. But apparently GitHub-flavoured Markdown and many other Markdown flavours don't support tables without headers.

That StackOverflow post linked above shows a hack that seems to work in many Markdown parsers, including in GitHub:

|    <!-- -->          |        <!-- -->                     |
|----------------------|-------------------------------------|
| **Title**            | Control Your Home with Raspberry Pi |
| **Author**           | Koen Vervloesem                     |
| **Publication date** | 2020-08-17                          |
| **Number of pages**  | 331                                 |
| **Price**            | € 37.50                             |
| **ISBN-13**          | 978-1-907920-94-3                   |
| **ISBN-10**          | 1-907920-94-3                       |
| **Publisher**        | Elektor International Media (EIM)   |

This adds HTML comment blocks in the header cells, which essentially adds an empty header row to the table. Unfortunately in GitHub the result looks a bit odd, with that compressed empty header row:

/images/markdown-table-without-header.png

This is literally an ugly hack. Of course I can just create an HTML table without a header in the Markdown file, as shown in one of the StackOverflow answers, but that defeats the purpose of using a more human-centered markup language. So now I have converted the README file from Markdown to reStructuredText. The result is rendered by GitHub as:

Just like I wanted. It's these small quibbles with Markdown all the time that strenghten my preference for reStructuredText as a markup language.