CODEWITHSUNDEEP
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Kamil S Jaron
Kamil S Jaron

Reputation: 546

A table in .md document included from external file

Is there an elegant way how to include table from an external file in markdown document rendered by GitHub?

Non elegant solutions I can think of:

  1. include it as image (this one is really really ugly)
  2. use Rmarkdown and print table using R (wont be rendered by default)

Just to give a bit of explanation. I am using a set of README.md files in my git repository (hosted by GitHub), so it is really clear to browse repo online, because GitHub renders automatically README.md file in every subdirectory.

I am algorithmically generating summary tables that should be included in those documents. It would be way more elegant if that table could be read from external file, because I do not want to write scripts that will modify README.md files directly.

Upvotes: 4

Views: 4248

Answers (1)

hansaplast
hansaplast

Reputation: 11573

There is no way to include files within markdown. So you need a "preprocessing" stage to generate the markdown which is then shown on Github (or rendered with normal markdown tools).

What Github supports is a basic table layout, which you'd need to render:

Solution 1: scripting

You could add something like this to your README.md:

<!-- TABLE_GENERATE_START -->

| First Header  | Second Header |
| ------------- | ------------- |
| Content Cell  | Content Cell  |
| Content Cell  | Content Cell  |

<!-- TABLE_GENERATE_END -->

And then have a script which pulls in the external table, reformats it to match the github format and puts it between the two comment.

Solution 2: pandoc

Pandoc is a document converter framework with many possible inputs and outputs. If you're up to learn another tool you could

  1. reformat you table into a markdown file using csv2table into table.md
  2. create a readme_header.md and readme_footer.md with the markdown before/after the table
  3. merge the three files with cat readme_header.md table.md readme_footer.md > REAME.md

Of course you can also do a mixture of both solutions, e.g. generate table.md using a script and merge using cat

Upvotes: 5

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