Can I disable printing lists of small integers as strings in Erlang shell?

Question

The Erlang shell \"guesses\" whether a given list is a printable string and prints it that way for convenience. Can this \"convenience\" be disabled?

Answer 1

As of Erlang/OTP R16B, you can use the function shell:strings/1 to turn this on or off. Note that it also affects printing of things that are actually meant to be strings, such as "foo" in the following example:

1> {[8,9,10], "foo"}.
{"\b\t\n","foo"}
2> shell:strings(false).
true
3> {[8,9,10], "foo"}.   
{[8,9,10],[102,111,111]}