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

The problem is that the string is not a type in Erlang. A string is just a list of integers, so there's no way for the shell to distinguish a printable string from a generic list. Don't know if this answer to your question.