putting output from print() into a string?

Uwe Ligges <ligges at statistik.uni-dortmund.de> writes:

On Sun, 12 Nov 2000, David Firth wrote:

Is there some neat way of storing the printed representation of an 
object as a character string?  I can see how it could be done via 
disk using sink() and then scan(), but that's ugly.

Something like Lisp-Stat's "with-output-to-string" macro perhaps?

dump() ?

I don't think that was what David was looking for. If you really want
to postprocess the printed output, the sink-then-scan method would
seem to be the way to do it (or the soon-to- be readLines() instead of
scan()). I suppose that a sink(text=...) could be implemented, but
AFAIK it is not on anyones TODO list. 

One obvious counterquestion is "Why?". It would normally be preferable
to retrieve information from the object itself rather than the printed
representation, which is generally lossful in a number of ways.

O__  ---- Peter Dalgaard             Blegdamsvej 3  
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