Is there a way to create a table with multi-line column names?

Question

I am attempting to create a table that has the following format of multi line heading for the columns

|Col1 Co2 Col3|

|Col1 Co2 Col3|

Tried this using the example and adding a | between 1st and 2nd line but did not work

T = table(categorical({'M';'F';'M'}),[45;32;34],...

      {'NY';'CA';'MA'},logical([1;0;0]),..

      'VariableNames',{'Gender|Gender2','Age|Age2','State|State2','Vote|Vote2'})

I am using R2018b student edition

Answer 1

No can do. Valid variable names of tables are similar to other variables in Matlab. They cannot contain \\n (new-line) or anything which is not letters and numbers. Underscore is the exception.

Answer 2

The ability to have arbitrary variable names in table s was added to release R2019b of MATLAB . Using that release, your code works as expected and produces:

T =
  3×4 table
    Gender|Gender2    Age|Age2    State|State2    Vote|Vote2
    ______________    ________    ____________    __________
          M              45          {'NY'}         true    
          F              32          {'CA'}         false   
          M              34          {'MA'}         false   

However, in your question you state that you want multi-line variables. You can make these in R2019b, but the display collapses the newline character into a ↵ , like this:

>> T = table(1, 'VariableNames', {['a', newline, 'b']})
T =
  table
    a↵b
    ___
     1 

If it's just the display you're after, you could consider making nested tables, like this:

t1 = table(1);
t2 = table(2);
T = table(t1, t2)

which results in:

T =
  1×2 table
     t1      t2 
    Var1    Var1
    ____    ____
     1       2  

Note that that final approach works in R2019a and prior releases.