Feature: convert markdown tables to readable plain-text format

[mecampbellsoup]

Feature request

Slack's mrkdwn format doesn't support markdown table syntax (pipes and hyphens). Currently slackify-markdown passes table markup through verbatim, which renders poorly in Slack — the |---|---| separator row is visible and outer pipes add visual noise.

Current behavior

from slackify_markdown import slackify_markdown

md = """\
| Feature | Python | Go |
|---|---|---|
| Typing | Dynamic | Static |
"""
print(slackify_markdown(md))

Output (rendered in Slack as raw text):

| Feature | Python | Go |
|---|---|---|
| Typing | Dynamic | Static |

Desired behavior

Strip separator rows and outer pipes to produce clean pipe-delimited text:

Feature | Python | Go
Typing | Dynamic | Static

Optionally bold the header row cells (since they're typically <th> elements in the parsed AST):

*Feature* | *Python* | *Go*
Typing | Dynamic | Static

Context

Slack does support proper tables via Block Kit's table block, but that requires using the blocks API rather than plain text — most consumers of this library are converting markdown to a text string. The plain-text approach above is the best available rendering for that use case, and matches what other conversion libraries (e.g. markdown-to-mrkdwn) produce.

[mecampbellsoup]

Update: Block Kit table alternative

For context, we ended up solving this on our side by detecting markdown tables in the converted output and rendering them as Slack Block Kit table blocks instead of plain text. This gives native table rendering with alternating row shading and bold headers.

The approach:

1. Split the response into text segments and table segments
2. Text goes into section blocks with mrkdwn (via slackify-markdown)
3. Tables get parsed into Block Kit table blocks with rich_text cells for bold headers and raw_text for data cells
4. Send via chat.postMessage(blocks=[...], text=fallback)

This works well for bot messages, but the plain-text improvement in the original request would still be valuable for contexts where Block Kit isn't available (e.g. notifications, email digests, text= fallback).

[thesmallstar]

Thanks, I will check this over the weekend :)