Re: Markdown, tables and CSV

[John MACFARLANE <jgm-TVLZxgkOlNX2fBVCVOL8/A@public.gmane.org>]

+++ Martin Fenner [May 20 16 12:38 ]:
>   I would rather use Pandoc with a CSV reader, but my Haskell isn't good
>   enough to write one.

This would be a pretty easy project for someone trying to
learn Haskell; maybe someone on the list wants to try it?
The cassava library works well for csv parsing.

>   For the second use case I see a clear advantage of CSV over the various
>   attempts to format tables in markdown (simple_tables, multiline_tables,
>   grid_tables, pipe_tables). Everyone (and many tools) understands the
>   CSV format, and you can do most of the things with CSV that the other
>   table formats allow (multi-column formats and column alignment are a
>   bit trickier). This has been done before using Pandoc filters, but I
>   think a Pandoc "csv_tables" Pandoc extension would make this easier for
>   the casual user. Using the grid_tables example from the Pandoc
>   documentation, this could look like this:
>
>   : Sample csv table.
>   ,,,
>   Fruit,Price,Advantages
>   Bananas,$1.34,- built-in wrapper\n- bright color
>   Oranges,$2.10, - cures scurvy\n- tasty
>   ,,,

I think that using a filter that processes specially marked
code blocks is a better way to go than introducing yet
another delimited block type.

For one thing, this will degrade much more gracefully when
you render it with a standard markdown renderer.
(The CSV will show up as code rather than garbage.)

One could think about integrating the filter into pandoc
itself, as an option, but the code and syntax would not
have to be different, I think.