siunitx: protecting lines with text from being formatted as number?

Question

The siunitx package has already been extremely helpful to me for formatting tables containing numbers and I now use the S-column in nearly every table of my thesis.

However there is one problem: In the heading lines of the table (between toprule and midrule) there is text and variables and units which regularly produce errors when columns are formatted with S[...] so that I have to manually enclose every one of those texts with round brackets }.

I wonder: Is there a way to exclude a whole tabular line from the S-column formatting and mark it as "text" (as if every cell would be written in "{}")?

Your question post seemed to have solved my problem with siunitx; thanks! I don't mind closing text with braces in tables with a manageable number of cells. — Ébe Isaac, Sep 17 '18 at 07:28

score 5 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 03 '11 at 19:46

5

The TeX \halign primitive, from which tabulars are built, is column-oriented. As a result, row operations are not trivial to implement. As a result, the current answer is that there is not a simple way to achieve what you'd like. I will of course consider possible approaches.

answered Jul 03 '11 at 19:46

Joseph Wright

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Joseph, @Martin: This reminds me on this answer to 'How to make a given table line bold'. Maybe the \rowfont macro can be used to insert a \relax? Would that be enough or does it has to be { }. (This requires the tabu package) – Martin Scharrer Jul 03 '11 at 20:06
2

@Martin: I suspect that tabu adds something to the end for the row, to allow a reset of 'things'. That works fine if you are happy to mess with the table mechanism, but siunitx avoids where possible doing anything like that. – Joseph Wright Jul 03 '11 at 20:21

score 3 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 21 '23 at 13:39

This can be achieved with the option guard from the package tabularray. The manual provides the following example.

\documentclass[border=6pt]{standalone}
\usepackage{tabularray}
\UseTblrLibrary{siunitx}
\begin{document}
\begin{tblr}{
  hlines, vlines,
  colspec={Q[si={table-format=3.2},c]Q[si={table-format=3.2},c]},
  row{1} = {guard}
}
   Head  & Head   \\
  111    & 111    \\
    2.1  &   2.2  \\
   33.11 &  33.22 \\
\end{tblr}
\end{document}

siunitx: protecting lines with text from being formatted as number?

2 Answers2