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22.3.4 FORMAT Printer Operations

22.3.4.1 Tilde A: Aesthetic

An arg, any object, is printed without escape characters (as by princ). If arg is a string, its characters will be output verbatim. If arg is nil it will be printed as nil; the colon modifier (~:A) will cause an arg of nil to be printed as (), but if arg is a composite structure, such as a list or vector, any contained occurrences of nil will still be printed as nil.

~mincolA inserts spaces on the right, if necessary, to make the width at least mincol columns. The @ modifier causes the spaces to be inserted on the left rather than the right.

~mincol,colinc,minpad,padcharA is the full form of ~A, which allows control of the padding. The string is padded on the right (or on the left if the @ modifier is used) with at least minpad copies of padchar; padding characters are then inserted colinc characters at a time until the total width is at least mincol. The defaults are 0 for mincol and minpad, 1 for colinc, and the space character for padchar.

~A binds *print-escape* to false, and *print-readably* to false.

22.3.4.2 Tilde S: Standard

This is just like ~A, but arg is printed with escape characters (as by prin1 rather than princ). The output is therefore suitable for input to read. ~S accepts all the arguments and modifiers that ~A does.

~S binds *print-escape* to t.

22.3.4.3 Tilde W: Write

An argument, any object, is printed obeying every printer control variable (as by write). In addition, ~W interacts correctly with depth abbreviation, by not resetting the depth counter to zero. ~W does not accept parameters. If given the colon modifier, ~W binds *print-pretty* to true. If given the at-sign modifier, ~W binds *print-level* and *print-length* to nil.

~W provides automatic support for the detection of circularity and sharing. If the value of *print-circle* is not nil and ~W is applied to an argument that is a circular (or shared) reference, an appropriate #n# marker is inserted in the output instead of printing the argument.