single column pipe table support

[blaenk]

Am I doing this wrong? It seems like simple_tables doesn't support a table with a single column. Now that I say "single column table" it does sound kind of stupid, to have a table with one column, but I'm curious as to why this is. I tried other table formats but couldn't get it working.

I found this old issue from 2011 that seems to have talked about it but I guess it was never followed through. It seems to work with multiline_tables but this tries to infer the column width and the items have to be separated by blank lines, it's too much of a hassle.

I ended up just doing raw html, but I figured I'd post this here in case it was forgotten.

[jgm]

What did you try? Here's a one-column simple table.
Here's another one.

[blaenk]

Sorry, I was in a hurry when I posted this; I should've provided a sample.

So for example I want a heading and then a list of one-line items, something like (notice they're left-aligned):

some heading
-------------
one item
two items
three items

[blaenk]

Actually I tried the following, among other things:

--------
Command
--------
one

two

three
--------

It works except for the fact that a <col> tag is output which tries to set the width that the table should use. See here.

[jgm]

Basically you just have to make sure that the heading doesn't get interpreted as a setext header. One way to do that (at least in pandoc's current interpretation of markdown syntax) is to indent the whole thing a couple spaces:

  head
  ----
  ok
  22

Note: it's possible that indented setext headers will be allowed at some point in the future.

It seems that one-column pipe tables don't work. I can't recall whether that was intentional (e.g. because they don't work in PHP markdown extra) or not. Will look into it. (Edit: was not intentional. PHP Markdown Extra, at least, allows one-column pipe tables. So pandoc should be fixed to allow them too.)