HTML tables inside Markdown

[Fethbita]

Hi, I am turning an OpenAPI spec into markdown using https://github.com/Mermade/widdershins and I can also edit the template to output a nice markdown. One problem is that it outputs lists in some tables and this is not supported in Markdown. My final desired result is Asciidoc, which supports lists in tables. So I came up with an idea of printing tables in html and turn the markdown document (with html tables that contain markdown lists) into Asciidoc using pandoc. However, I can't achieve the desired result.

Example input:

<table>
<tr><th>Col1</th><th>Col2</th><th>Col3</th><th>Col4</th><th>Col5</th></tr>
<tr>
<td>Cell 1</td>
<td>Cell 2</td>
<td>Cell 3</td>
<td>Cell 4</td>
<td>Markdown text

with lists:

* List item 1
  * List inside a list
  * List inside a list 2
  * List inside a list 3
* List item 2
* List item 3
* List item 4 [example link](https://example.com)

Another list:

* Other `list` 1
* **Other** list 2
</td>
</tr>
</table>

Using the lua filter from https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/631272:

function RawBlock (raw)
  return raw.format:match 'html'
    and pandoc.read(raw.text, 'html').blocks
    or raw
end

With the command:

pandoc --wrap none --from=markdown-markdown_in_html_blocks -t asciidoc --lua-filter=pandoc-filter.lua --verbose test.md > test.adoc

results in the following:

[cols=",,,,",options="header",]
|===
|Col1 |Col2 |Col3 |Col4 |Col5
|Cell 1 |Cell 2 |Cell 3 |Cell 4 |Markdown text with lists: * List item 1 * List inside a list * List inside a list 2 * List inside a list 3 * List item 2 * List item 3 * List item 4 [example link](https://example.com) Another list: * Other `list` 1 * **Other** list 2
|===

If I instead use the following lua filter from https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/706748:

function RawBlock (raw)
    if raw.format:match 'html' then
        blocks = pandoc.read(raw.text, 'html').blocks
        for i = 1, #blocks do
            blocks[i] = pandoc.walk_block(blocks[i],
                {
                    SoftBreak = function(el)
                        return pandoc.Str("\n")
                    end,
                    Plain = function(el)
                        return pandoc.read(pandoc.utils.stringify(el), 'markdown').blocks
                    end
                }
            )
        end
        return blocks
    end
    return raw
end

with the same command, I end up with:

[cols=",,,,",options="header",]
|===
|Col1 |Col2 |Col3 |Col4 |Col5
|Cell 1 |Cell 2 |Cell 3 |Cell 4 |Markdown text with lists: * List item 1 * List inside a list * List inside a list 2 * List inside a list 3 * List item 2 * List item 3 * List item 4 https://example.com[example link] Another list: * Other `+list+` 1 * *Other* list 2
|===

Which is more correct (links are rendered correctly) but the list structure is still lost.

[jgm]

Pandoc's markdown supports grid tables, which do allow lists in them.

If you want to convert something like

<td>Markdown text

with lists:

* List item 1
  * List inside a list
  * List inside a list 2
  * List inside a list 3
* List item 2
* List item 3
* List item 4 [example link](https://example.com)

Another list:

* Other `list` 1
* **Other** list 2
</td>

with markdown content inside HTML tags, you'll need a blank line before and after the markdown content if you're using -f gfm or -f commonmark. If you're using -f markdown, then you should not add -markdown_in_html_blocks, since that disables that extension (which is enabled by default). - = disable, + = enable.

But what you're doing isn't going to work, anyway -- once pandoc preserves the list structure, it will not emit a pipe table.

[Fethbita]

Thanks for the answer and explanation @jgm. For future readers, I instead achieved the result with a few regexes:

perl -p -i -e 's/ \* /\n* /g;' test.adoc
perl -p -i -0 -e 's/(\n[^\*\n]+?)\n\* /$1\n\n* /g;' test.adoc