Null Sentinels

md2pydantic recognizes common placeholder values in table cells and converts them to None for optional fields.

Example

from pydantic import BaseModel
from md2pydantic import MDConverter

class Employee(BaseModel):
    name: str
    department: str
    salary: float | None = None

markdown = """
| name  | department  | salary |
|-------|-------------|--------|
| Alice | Engineering | 95000  |
| Bob   | Marketing   | N/A    |
| Carol | Sales       | -      |
"""

employees = MDConverter(Employee).parse_tables(markdown)
# employees[0].salary == 95000.0
# employees[1].salary is None  (from "N/A")
# employees[2].salary is None  (from "-")

Recognized Sentinels

The following values are treated as None:

Sentinel	Example cell
Empty	\| \|
N/A	\| N/A \|
NA	\| NA \|
null	\| null \|
-	\| - \|
—	\| — \|

Matching is case-insensitive: n/a, N/A, Null, and NULL are all treated the same.

Warning

The target field must be Optional (e.g., float | None = None). If a sentinel value appears in a required field, Pydantic will raise a validation error.