Wiki Table

Twic I allows you to write a table. Wiki Tables are done with the | character, in a way somewhat similar to Wiki Lists: the start of each row is marked by a | at the beginning of the line, and a block is recognised as a table by the fact that it starts with a |. Tables are different to lists in that the | also serves to separate the cells in each row. Within the cells, the normal Wiki Text formatting rules work (italic, bold, Wiki Names, etc). The first row in a table is taken a heading.

The | character doesn't have a particularly exciting name (unlike #, which is officially known as an octothorpe); most people call it the 'vertical bar', although hackers nickname it the 'pipe'. Confusingly, it is often printed on the keyboard (and sometimes even on screen) as a broken pipe, sort of like it's been bred with a colon. As far as typing is concerned, | is often the shifted character on the backslash key (ie hold shift and hit backslash); the backslash key is at the bottom left of a standard 105-key keyboard, but may be on the middle right of a Mac keyboard. For more about the history of this character, consult <http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/latin1/ascii-hist.html#7C>.

Let's have an example:

Note that although you don't need trailing |s, you can have them if you like:

Note that you also don't need so much whitespace:

In addition, since row boundaries are determined by the presence of a | right at the start of a line, it is possible to spread rows over several lines by judicious use of spaces, like so:

You may wonder what very small tables look like. They look like this:

Originally, the HTML that Twic I generated uses minimalistic markup for tables; this have a fairly elegant look, but it could be a little hard on the eye. Thus, a simple border was added. This change is under review.

Category Wiki