[Python-markdown-discuss] colspan/rowspan for tables?

[Maurice v. d. P. <gri...@kf...>]

My colleagues and I have been creating some tables for which a rowspan
feature would have been useful, but unfortunately it's not supported by
the current syntax.

Before looking into writing my own extension, I wanted to ask you if
you're open to changes in the existing tables extension to support
colspan and rowspan.

The syntax I had in mind uses adjacent pipes for signalling colspan and
underscores for rowspan, e.g.:

|col1        |col2    |
|------------|--------|
|colspan example     ||
|rowspan ex. |        |
|__          |        |
|blah        |blah    |

The second (or third, etc) adjacent pipe characters are currently
ignored and do not lead to the creation of additional cells. The above
example would currently have a single cell on second row that was as
wide as the cell containing "col1". Only when there's a space in between
the pipes will an additional cell be created. So for colspan I expect
the change would not break a lot of documents.

The syntax for rowspan could be in use at the moment, but the chance of
breaking existing documents can hopefully be kept small by choosing a
syntax that requires the cell to contain only underscores and spaces and
optionally (to be more strict) requires the underscores to be on the
first and/or last character position in the cell.

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts on the matter.

Best regards,
Maurice.

-- 
Maurice van der Pot

Kdiff3 developer   gri...@kf...   http://kdiff3.sourceforge.net
Tdiff3 developer                            https://github.com/Griffon26/tdiff3