ASCII Table Generator with Unicode Box Drawing
Paste CSV or TSV — including cells copied from Excel — and get a plain-text table drawn with "+---+" or "┌─┬─┐" borders. Handy for READMEs, code comments and emails. For GitHub-style tables, use the CSV/TSV to Markdown Table Converter.
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Notes
- Full-width characters count as two columns wide. View the table in a monospaced font; a proportional font will misalign the borders.
- Some fonts do not draw full-width characters at exactly twice the width of half-width ones, and Unicode box-drawing characters can vary in width, so borders may be slightly off.
- With "Use the first row as header" on, a line is drawn under the first row. With "Line between every row" on, a line is drawn between all rows.
- Turning on "Treat box lines as double-width" counts each box-drawing character as two columns. The borders then line up in fonts that draw these characters wide, but drift in fonts that draw them narrow. If a column width would be odd, one space is added to make it even. Only the Unicode single line and rounded styles are affected. Rounded corners (╭╮╰╯) are drawn narrow in many fonts, so the rounded style may not line up completely. Double line and ASCII styles are unchanged (in fonts such as MS Gothic, double lines are drawn narrow, so leave the option off for them).
- A line break inside a cell becomes a multi-line cell. Rows with fewer columns are filled with empty cells, and blank lines are ignored.
Glossary
ASCII table
A table whose frame is drawn with just "+", "-" and "|". It survives almost any environment, which makes it a good fit for code comments and plain-text email.
Unicode box drawing
Dedicated line-drawing characters such as "┌", "─" and "│". They look cleaner than ASCII borders but may not line up unless a monospaced font is used.
Monospaced font
A font where every half-width character has the same width. Text tables only look aligned when shown in one.
FAQ
The borders look misaligned where I pasted the table.
Check that the destination uses a monospaced font. A proportional font breaks the width ratio between half-width and full-width characters. A code editor or a GitHub code block (```) will display it correctly.
Should I use ASCII or Unicode borders?
ASCII borders are the safe choice for source-code comments and for email where you do not know the reader's setup. For READMEs where looks matter, Unicode borders are nicer, though some fonts draw them at an uneven width.
Can I paste a table straight from Excel?
Yes. Copy the range in Excel and paste it; it is detected as tab-separated (TSV) automatically. If the delimiter is guessed wrong, choose it from the dropdown.
Do full-width characters and emoji line up?
Full-width text such as Japanese, and emoji, are counted as two columns wide when padding. The real width depends on the font, so in some environments a row can still be off by one column.
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