5.10 Object Printing

► |  | The Racket Reference

1 | Language Model
2 | Syntactic Forms
3 | Datatypes
4 | Structures
5 | Classes and Objects
6 | Units
7 | Contracts
8 | Pattern Matching
9 | Control Flow
10 | Concurrency and Parallelism
11 | Macros
12 | Input and Output
13 | Reflection and Security
14 | Operating System
15 | Memory Management
16 | Unsafe Operations
17 | Running Racket
| Bibliography
| Index

▼ | 5 | Classes and Objects

5.1 | Creating Interfaces
5.2 | Creating Classes
5.3 | Creating Objects
5.4 | Field and Method Access
5.5 | Mixins
5.6 | Traits
5.7 | Object and Class Contracts
5.8 | Object Equality and Hashing
5.9 | Object Serialization
5.10 | Object Printing
5.11 | Object, Class, and Interface Utilities
5.12 | Surrogates

On this page:

printable<%>
writable<%>

top ← prev up next →

#### 5.10`` Object Printing

To customize the way that a class instance is printed by print, write and display, implement the printable<%> interface.

> value printable<%> : interface?

The printable<%> interface includes only the custom-print, custom-write, and custom-display methods. The custom-print method accepts two arguments: the destination port and the current quasiquote depth as an exact nonnegative integer. The custom-write and custom-display methods each accepts a single argument, which is the destination port to write or display the object.

Calls to the custom-print, custom-write, or custom-display methods are like calls to a procedure attached to a structure type through the prop:custom-write property. In particular, recursive printing can trigger an escape from the call.

See prop:custom-write for more information. The printable<%> interface is implemented with interface* and prop:custom-write.

> value writable<%> : interface?

Like printable<%>, but includes only the custom-write and custom-display methods. A print request is directed to custom-write.
top ← prev up next →