A table in .md document included from external file - github

Question

Is there an elegant way how to include table from an external file in markdown document rendered by GitHub?
Non elegant solutions I can think of:
include it as image (this one is really really ugly)
use Rmarkdown and print table using R (wont be rendered by default)
Just to give a bit of explanation. I am using a set of README.md files in my git repository (hosted by GitHub), so it is really clear to browse repo online, because GitHub renders automatically README.md file in every subdirectory.
I am algorithmically generating summary tables that should be included in those documents. It would be way more elegant if that table could be read from external file, because I do not want to write scripts that will modify README.md files directly.

Answer 1

There is no way to include files within markdown. So you need a "preprocessing" stage to generate the markdown which is then shown on Github (or rendered with normal markdown tools).
What Github supports is a basic table layout, which you'd need to render:
Solution 1: scripting
You could add something like this to your README.md:
<!-- TABLE_GENERATE_START -->
| First Header | Second Header |
| ------------- | ------------- |
| Content Cell | Content Cell |
| Content Cell | Content Cell |
<!-- TABLE_GENERATE_END -->
And then have a script which pulls in the external table, reformats it to match the github format and puts it between the two comment.
Solution 2: pandoc
Pandoc is a document converter framework with many possible inputs and outputs. If you're up to learn another tool you could
reformat you table into a markdown file using csv2table into table.md
create a readme_header.md and readme_footer.md with the markdown before/after the table
merge the three files with cat readme_header.md table.md readme_footer.md > REAME.md
Of course you can also do a mixture of both solutions, e.g. generate table.md using a script and merge using cat