Книга: Practical Common Lisp

Basic Formatting

Basic Formatting

Now you're ready to look at specific directives. I'll start with several of the most commonly used directives, including some you've seen in previous chapters.

The most general-purpose directive is ~A, which consumes one format argument of any type and outputs it in aesthetic (human-readable) form. For example, strings are output without quotation marks or escape characters, and numbers are output in a natural way for the type of number. If you just want to emit a value for human consumption, this directive is your best bet.

(format nil "The value is: ~a" 10) ==> "The value is: 10"
(format nil "The value is: ~a" "foo") ==> "The value is: foo"
(format nil "The value is: ~a" (list 1 2 3)) ==> "The value is: (1 2 3)"

A closely related directive, ~S, likewise consumes one format argument of any type and outputs it. However, ~S tries to generate output that can be read back in with READ. Thus, strings will be enclosed in quotation marks, symbols will be package-qualified when necessary, and so on. Objects that don't have a READable representation are printed with the unreadable object syntax, #<>. With a colon modifier, both the ~A and ~S directives emit NIL as () rather than NIL. Both the ~A and ~S directives also take up to four prefix parameters, which can be used to control whether padding is added after (or before with the at-sign modifier) the value, but those parameters are only really useful for generating tabular data.

The other two most frequently used directives are ~%, which emits a newline, and ~&, which emits a fresh line. The difference between the two is that ~% always emits a newline, while ~& emits one only if it's not already at the beginning of a line. This is handy when writing loosely coupled functions that each generate a piece of output and that need to be combined in different ways. For instance, if one function generates output that ends with a newline (~%) and another function generates some output that starts with a fresh line (~&), you don't have to worry about getting an extra blank line if you call them one after the other. Both of these directives can take a single prefix parameter that specifies the number of newlines to emit. The ~% directive will simply emit that many newline characters, while the ~& directive will emit either n - 1 or n newlines, depending on whether it starts at the beginning of a line.

Less frequently used is the related ~~ directive, which causes FORMAT to emit a literal tilde. Like the ~% and ~& directives, it can be parameterized with a number that controls how many tildes to emit.

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