Cfrgtkky

I am using siunitx to align the decimals in a table. The problem is that for some reason the it does not let me input the letter e. Other letters, such as a are fine.

Here is the code I am using.

usepackage{multirow}

usepackage[detect-all]{siunitx}



begin{table}

begin{tabular}{@{}c S[table-format=2.1] S[table-format=2.1] @{}}



header & a & e \

a & 32.4 & 12.2 \

c & 0.1  & 3.4 \



end{tabular}

end{table}

Here is what I get. I was expecting to see both a and e in the header row. However, I only get a.

The only error message I get is Invalid numerical input 'e'. How to fix this? Thanks!

siunitx parses the contents of a column of type S unless the option parse-numbers=false was set -- which isn't the case in the code snippet you posted. For this reason, the letters d, e, and j will cause a crash unless they're encountered in numeric expressions such as 1e5, 2d7, or -j. (In the third example, j is taken to be a way to encode the imaginary number, aka i.) Depending on the circumstances, the letter g can also be interpreted to have a special meaning.

siunitx has become smart enough in recent years to be able to figure out that inputs such as cat and fly cannot possibly represent numbers and hence should be treated as pure text. This smartness is, incidentally, the reason why a in one of the cells of your code snippet doesn't cause a problem. However, since it isn't all that challenging to write {cat} and {fly}, do make a habit of encasing non-numeric terms -- they occur rather frequently in the header cell(s) of S columns... -- in curly braces. That way, you're sure to have eliminated all uncertainty about how text in header cells should be processed.