Rule - MD058

Property	Value
Aliases	md058, blanks-around-tables
Autofix Available	No
Enabled By Default	Yes

Summary

Tables should be surrounded by blank lines.

Reasoning

Correctness

For a GFM table to be recognized, it generally needs to be separated from the surrounding content by blank lines. When a blank line is missing, the text next to the table is often absorbed into the table (or absorbs the table into a paragraph), producing output the author did not intend. Requiring a blank line above and below each table keeps the table distinct from its neighbors.

Examples

Failure Scenarios

This rule triggers when a table is not preceded by a blank line:

# Heading
| abc | def |
| --- | --- |
| ghi | jkl |

or not followed by a blank line:

| abc | def |
| --- | --- |
| ghi | jkl |
# Heading

Correct Scenarios

This rule does not trigger when the table has a blank line both above and below it:

# Heading

| abc | def |
| --- | --- |
| ghi | jkl |

More text.

A table at the very start or very end of the document does not require a blank line on the missing side.

Configuration

Prefixes
plugins.md058.
plugins.blanks-around-tables.

Value Name	Type	Default	Description
enabled	boolean	True	Whether the Rule Plugin is enabled.

As tables are only recognized when the Markdown Tables extension is enabled, this rule has no effect unless that extension is turned on.

Origination of Rule

This rule is largely inspired by the MarkdownLint rule MD058.

Differences From MarkdownLint Rule

MarkdownLint treats a line containing only an HTML comment as a blank line when deciding whether a table is surrounded by blank lines. This rule uses the parsed document structure instead, so a table separated from adjacent content only by an HTML-comment line is reported as not surrounded by blank lines.