Markdown Table Cleaner

What this fixes

Markdown pipe tables copied from AI tools, GitHub, wikis, and documentation often arrive with inconsistent spacing, missing outer pipes, or mismatched column widths. This tool normalizes all of that:

• Uneven column spacing — each column is padded to a consistent width so columns visually line up in a monospace editor.
• Missing outer pipes — rows like A | B | C are converted to | A | B | C |.
• Malformed or missing separator rows — the | --- | --- | separator is repaired if malformed, or inserted after the first row if absent (a notice appears when this happens).
• Alignment markers preserved — :---, ---:, and :---: for left, right, and center alignment are detected and kept.
• Column count mismatches — short rows are padded with empty cells rather than shifting content into the wrong column.
• Escaped pipes and inline code — \| and `pipe|code` are not treated as column delimiters.
• Multiple tables and surrounding text — each table is cleaned independently; paragraphs, headings, and other text between tables are left exactly as written.
• Fenced code blocks — lines inside ``` or ~~~ fences are never touched, even if they contain pipe characters.

Before and after

Name | Age | City
--- | --- | ---
Alice | 30 | New York
Bob|25|London

| Name  | Age | City     |
| ----- | --- | -------- |
| Alice | 30  | New York |
| Bob   | 25  | London   |

Markdown Table Cleaner vs Markdown Paste Cleaner

CopyTidy has two tools for Markdown content, and they do opposite things:

• Markdown Table Cleaner (this tool) — keeps tables as tables. It fixes alignment, spacing, and separator rows so your table stays valid Markdown, ready to paste back into a README, GitHub issue, or wiki editor.
• Markdown Paste Cleaner — removes Markdown formatting entirely, including table pipes and separator rows, leaving plain prose. Use that tool when you want a table's content as readable text rather than a formatted table.

Use the Table Cleaner to tidy a table you are editing or pasting into a Markdown context. Use the Paste Cleaner to extract content from a table into plain text.