CSV to LaTeX Table Converter

LaTeX has ten characters that mean something other than themselves. Seven of them take a backslash:

&  %  $  #  _  {  }   →   \&  \%  \$  \#  \_  \{  \}

Two of them do not. A bare ~ is a non-breaking space, so it prints as a gap rather than a tilde and needs \textasciitilde{}. A bare ^ starts a superscript, so a^b silently raises the b and needs \textasciicircum{}.

The tenth is the backslash itself, and it is the one that catches naive implementations. You cannot escape it with a backslash, because \\ is a line break and inside a table it ends the row. It needs \textbackslash{}. And crucially, it has to be replaced first, through a placeholder, because the other nine replacements all introduce backslashes of their own. Replace them in the obvious order and a cell containing 100% comes out as 100\textbackslash{}%, which is worse than doing nothing.

A supplier column with Fenwick & Sons in it, a discount column of 10%, a price in dollars and a Windows path all appear in ordinary business data, and any one of them turns into a compiler error forty lines from where the problem actually is. The error LaTeX gives you for an unescaped ampersand is Misplaced alignment tab character &, which is accurate and tells you nothing about which cell.

The booktabs package documentation is unusually opinionated for a LaTeX manual, and its two main rules are: never use vertical rules, and never use double horizontal rules. What it recommends instead is three rules total, a \toprule, a \midrule under the header, and a \bottomrule, with white space doing the work that lines were doing badly.

A table with \hline after every row and pipes between every column is precisely the thing that argument is against. It is also what most generated LaTeX looks like, and what a lot of departmental templates still specify. So both are here. Booktabs is the default because it is what a table in a published paper looks like; the hline style is one dropdown away when a supervisor or a journal template asks for it.

If you pick booktabs and are not writing a standalone file, the output tells you to add \usepackage{booktabs} to your preamble. Forgetting that is the second most common reason this kind of table fails to compile, after unescaped ampersands.

More than about twelve columns will not fit the text width of a portrait page, and LaTeX does not wrap a tabular, it lets it overflow into the margin with an overfull hbox warning you will probably not read. When the column count crosses that line you get a warning here suggesting landscape via the pdflscape package, a smaller font size, or tabularx with an X column that absorbs the slack. A standalone file gets landscape geometry set for you.

A label with no prefix gets a nudge. The convention is tab: for a table, fig: for a figure, eq: for an equation, and the cleveref package relies on it to write "Table 3" rather than just "3". A label of results works but tells \cref nothing.

A line break inside a cell becomes a space, and the count is reported. There is no way to keep it without changing the column type: a \\ inside a cell ends the row, and a real wrapped paragraph needs a p{width} column, which changes the geometry of the whole table and needs a width you have to choose. Flattening and saying so leaves that decision with you.