Convert a Markdown table to CSV

Goal: Turn a table in a doc into CSV, e.g. to pull it into a spreadsheet.

Prerequisites: The table module, via -A or nodes.

Query

$ mq -A 'import "table" | table::tables | first | table::to_csv' README.md

Input

| Name  | Age |
| ----- | --- |
| Alice | 30  |

Output

Name,Age
Alice,30

Using a different delimiter

to_csv takes an optional delimiter, so the same function produces TSV or PSV output too:

$ mq -A 'import "table" | table::tables | first | table::to_csv(self, "\t")' README.md

Name	Age
Alice	30

Notes

• Fields containing the delimiter, a quote, or a newline are quoted and escaped per RFC 4180 automatically. A cell holding "Hi, there" becomes """Hi, there""" in the output, no manual escaping needed.
• A document with more than one table? table::tables returns all of them as an array; pick the one you want with first, or by index with (table::tables())[1] for the second table.
• Want structured data instead of a CSV string, e.g. to feed into join_by or another array builtin? Use table::to_array instead, which returns an array of dicts keyed by header text.
• Going the other direction? See Convert CSV to a Markdown table.