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io.ascii latex tables - take unit from inout table if given #2870
Description
Inspired by #2869
LaTeX and AASTex already have a mechanism to print units, but only if explicetly passed in. If no units are given, those writers could use the units already defined in the table column - we have a latex representation for that.
This works:
from astropy.table import Table, Column
import astropy
from copy import deepcopy
COSobs = Table([Column(name='date', data=['a','b']),
Column(name='NUV exp.time', data=[1,2]),
])
latexdict = deepcopy(astropy.io.ascii.latexdicts['AA'])
latexdict['units'] = {'NUV exp.time':'s', 'FUV ext.time':'s'}
COSobs.write(sys.stdout, format='ascii.aastex', latexdict=latexdict,
caption=r"\label{tab:obsCOS}Observations log of \emph{HST}/COS observations")
out:
\begin{table}{cc}
\tablecaption{\label{tab:obsCOS}Observations log of \emph{HST}/COS observations}
\tablehead{\colhead{date} & \colhead{NUV exp.time}\\ \colhead{ } & \colhead{s}}
\startdata
a & 1 \\
b & 2 \\
\enddata
\end{table}
But this should probably also work:
COSobs = Table([Column(name='date', data=['a','b']),
Column(name='NUV exp.time', data=[1,2], unit=astropy.units.s),
])
COSobs.write(sys.stdout, format='ascii.aastex')
No units in output:
\begin{deluxetable}{cc}
\tablehead{\colhead{date} & \colhead{NUV exp.time}}
\startdata
a & 1 \\
b & 2 \\
\enddata
\end{deluxetable}
Activity
mdmueller commentedon Oct 30, 2014
I just tried implementing this and found that changing the unit functionality will break certain tests in
test_write.py. @hamogu - Do you have a sense for whether this will cause significant compatibility issues?hamogu commentedon Oct 30, 2014
Here we explicitly want a change in behaviour. If units are specified in a table, then they shall also be in the output. Since we don't have that now, all tests that use a table with units will have to change.
Yes, this is a slight change in API, but I am totally fine with it for three reasons:
\multicolumn).We should however think about reading tables with units and see if we can at least read the tables that we write (it's not a required feature to round-trip LaTeX tables, but would be nice).