Create a table without a header in Markdown

Answer 1

$ cat foo.md
Key 1 | Value 1
Key 2 | Value 2

$ kramdown foo.md
<table>
  <tbody>
    <tr>
      <td>Key 1</td>
      <td>Value 1</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>Key 2</td>
      <td>Value 2</td>
    </tr>
  </tbody>
</table>

Answer 2

The following works well for me in GitHub. The first row is no longer bolded as it is not a header:

<table align="center">
    <tr>
        <td align="center"><img src="docs/img1.png?raw=true" alt="some text"></td>
        <td align="center">Some other text</td>
        <td align="center">More text</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td align="center"><img src="docs/img2.png?raw=true" alt="some text"></td>
        <td align="center">Some other text 2</td>
        <td align="center">More text 2</td>
    </tr>
</table>

Check a sample HTML table without a header here.

Answer 3

Most Markdown parsers don't support tables without headers. That means the separation line for headers is mandatory.

Parsers that do not support tables without headers

• multimarkdown
• Maruku: A popular implementation in Ruby
• byword: "All tables must begin with one or more rows of headers"

• PHP Markdown Extra "second line contains a mandatory separator line between the headers and the content"

• RDiscount Uses PHP Markdown Extra syntax.

• GitHub Flavoured Markdown
• Parsedown: A parser in PHP (used e.g. in Laravel emails)

Parsers that do support tables without headers.

• Kramdown: A parser in Ruby
• Text::MultiMarkdown: Perl CPAN module.
• MultiMarkdown: Windows application.
• ParseDown Extra: A parser in PHP.
• Pandoc: A document converter for the command line written in Haskell (supports header-less tables via its simple_tables and multiline_tables extensions)
• Flexmark: A parser in Java.

CSS solution

If you're able to change the CSS of the HTML output you can however leverage the :empty pseudo class to hide an empty header and make it look like there is no header at all.

Answer 4

At least for the GitHub Flavoured Markdown, you can give the illusion by making all the non‑header row entries bold with the regular __ or ** formatting:

|Regular | text | in header | turns bold |
|-|-|-|-|
| __So__ | __bold__ | __all__ | __table entries__ |
| __and__ | __it looks__ | __like a__ | __"headerless table"__ |

Answer 5

@thamme-gowda's solution works for images too!

| | |:----------------------------------------------------------------------------:| | ![](https://gravatar.com/avatar/4cc702785290b4934c531c56f6061e5e "Tonejito") |

You can check this out on a gist I made for that. Here is a render of the table hack on GitHub and GitLab: