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 "{}")?

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    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 7:28

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.

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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 3 '11 at 20:06
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    @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 3 '11 at 20:21

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