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

You can disable such behavior with shell:strings/1 function starting with Erlang R16B.

Just remember that this is option global to all node shells, and it might be wise to set it back after finishing playing is shell in longer living nodes.