Extract all tables from a document

Goal: Get every table in a document as structured table objects, ready for further transformation (add a row, convert to CSV, reshape, …).

Prerequisites: The table module, via -A or nodes. Unlike the section module, import "table" must be written explicitly — it isn’t auto-imported.

Query

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

Or with nodes:

import "table"
| nodes
| table::tables

Input

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

Output

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

Notes

• Table objects print back as Markdown automatically in CLI output, so table::to_markdown isn’t needed here. It is needed when using the table module from Rust or other embedding code, where table objects stay plain dicts — and since table::tables returns an array (there can be more than one table), narrow to a single table first: table::tables | first | table::to_markdown.
• Chain | first after table::tables when you only want the first table, as the other table recipes in this Cookbook do.