Docs: Mention alternative package for generating Markdown tables

[montanaflynn]

Bug Report Checklist

• I have pulled the latest main branch of the repository.
• I have searched for related issues and found none that matched my issue.

Overview

horizontalSeparator gets very close to markdown tables, if it could also put a separator under the first row it would be a fully compliant markdown table. I like to print tables that can be copied and pasted into issues or markdown files.

Without header separator:

abc  | abcd |  abc
1234 |  12  | 1234

abc | abcd | abc
1234 | 12 | 1234

With header separator:

abc  | abcd |  abc
---- | ---- | ----
1234 |  12  | 1234

abc	abcd	abc
1234	12	1234

Additional Info

No response

[JoshuaKGoldberg]

Hey thanks for suggesting this @montanaflynn! It didn't occur to me just how close this package is to Markdown tables, good spot.

But, actually getting compliant Markdown tables would be a bit more involved than this. There are a lot of edge cases around cell data sanitization that'd have to be accounted for. For example, cells with special characters such as '|' and '\n':

import { textTable } from "text-table";

console.log(
	textTable(
		[["a", "|", "\n", "z"]],
		{ horizontalSeparator: "|" },
	),
);

a|||
|z

This package is very small right now. Adding in handling for those and other encoding things would increase its size a lot and hurt runtime performance.

I think it'd make sense to instead link to a dedicated package for a markdown table in the README.md. Adding docs would help explain that this package is just for very basic + quick table layout, not full Markdown / GFM workability. A quick Google/npm search shows https://www.npmjs.com/package/markdown-table - which actually mentions the original text-table at the bottom of its README.md!