Deriving, Format-ting and unicode

Learning
, ,
1

I get a UTF8 string from C++ and want to copy it to OCaml side. Right now I’m using standard string type. And printing of these strings is not fancy.

I heard that visualization of unicode string somehow depend on the destination where I’m printing it. But my understanding is very vague and I’m not sure. Example

main.ml

type t = A of string [@@deriving show]

let p = A "(\208\149\208\178\208\179\208\181\208\189\208\184\208\185)"

let () =
  let (A s) = p in
  print_endline s
;;

let () = Format.printf "%a\n%!" pp p

And I get

(Евгений)            
(Main.A "(\208\149\208\178\208\179\208\181\208\189\208\184\208\185)")

Clearly Format is not so fancy in printing.

Questions:

  1. Which alternatives we have to store UTF8 string as OCaml value?
  2. Is there any ppx_deriving special attribute that repairs printing of Unicode? Or Format-specific one?
2

The issue is not Format, which prints UTF-8-encoded strings just fine. Rather, it is the PPX-derived pretty-printer that prints the string in escaped form, so every character outside of the ASCII range is being shown in decimal form (\ddd).

Cheers,
Nicolas

3

Thanks! The right solution is

type t = A of (string[@printer fun fmt -> fprintf fmt "%s"]) 
[@@deriving show]
4

Seconded. You could add [@printer Format.pp_print_string] to use the direct unescaped printer.

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