Honestly ocaml format module is a royal PITA to use. The only documentation apart the reference manual is this document here. Don’t get me wrong. I think it’s a very nice piece of software and absolutely worth having it in the stdlib, but it simply not intuitive (at least for me) to use at the first glance. I’ll write down a couple of example. hopefully this will help me - and others - the next time I’ll need to use it.
I’m going to use the Format.fprintf function quite a lot. This
function uses similar formatting string to the more widely used
Printf.fprintf. In the Format module page you can find all the
details. Let’s start easy and print a string. We write a pretty
printer function pp_cell that gets a formatter and an element.
This is my favourite way of writing printing function as I can daisy
chain together in a printf function call using the "%a"
formatting string. If the formatter is Format.std_formatter the
string will be printed on stdout.
let pp_cell fmt cell = Format.fprintf fmt "%s" cell
Next we examine a simple function to pretty printer a list of elements. The signature of this function is quite similar as before, but this time we also pass an optional separator and a pretty printer for the element of the string.
let rec pp_list ?(sep="") pp_element fmt = function
|[h] -> Format.fprintf fmt "%a" pp_element h
|h::t ->
Format.fprintf fmt "%a%s@,%a"
pp_element h sep (pp_list ~sep pp_element) t
|[] -> ()
The function takes care of printing the separator after all elements but the last one.
Let’s start playing witht the boxes. The formatting boxes are the main reason why I use the format module and they are very handy if you want to pretty print nested structure easily.
If we use the std_formatter and the list pretty printer without formatting box, we obtain this output.
# let fmt = Format.std_formatter ;;
# (pp_list ~sep:"," pp_cell) fmt ["aa";"bb";"cc"];;
aa,bb,
cc- : unit =
#
that is the same as :
# Format.fprintf fmt "%a" (pp_list ~sep:"," pp_cell) ["aa";"bb";"cc"];;
aa,bb,
cc- : unit = ()
To be frank, I don’t quite get yet why the formatter decide to add a
new line after the last comma… but moving on. If I now use a
formatting box, the result is different. To print the list one one
line, I can use the hbox. If I want a vertical list, I can use
the vbox. This gives respectively:
# Format.fprintf fmt "@[<h>%a@]@." (pp_list ~sep:"," pp_cell) ["aa";"bb";"cc"];;
aa,bb,cc
# Format.fprintf fmt "@[<v>%a@]@." (pp_list ~sep:"," pp_cell) ["aa";"bb";"cc"];;
aa,
bb,
cc
If we want to print a list with one character of indentation, this can be easily done as:
Format.fprintf fmt "@[<v 1>@,%a@]@." (pp_list ~sep:"," pp_cell) ["aa";"bb";"cc"];;
aa,
bb,
cc
The idea is that by changing the type of formatting boxes, the soft
break @, is interpreted differently by the formatter, once as
newline, once as space. Moreover by adding an indentation, the
formatter will take care of adding an offset to all strings printed
within that box. And this is a winner when pretty printing nested structures.
Lets now delve a bit deeper and let’s try to format a table… I
didn’t found any tutorial on the net about this, but bit and pieces of
code buried into different projects… A table for me is a tuple
composed by a header (a string array) and two-dimensional array string
array. The point here is to format the table in a way where each
element is displayed in a column in relation to the longest element in
the table. First we need two support pretty printers, one for the
header and the other one the each row in the table. In order to set
the tabulation margins of the table, we need to find, for each column
the longest string in the table. The result of this computation (the
function is shown below in pp_table) is an array of integer
widths. When we print the header of the table, we make sure to
set the width of each column with the Format.pp_set_tab fmt
function. The magic of the Format module will take care of the rest.
The second function to print each row is pretty straightforward to understand.
let pp_header widths fmt header =
let first_row = Array.map (fun x -> String.make (x + 1) ' ') widths in
Array.iteri (fun j cell ->
Format.pp_set_tab fmt ();
for z=0 to (String.length header.(j)) - 1 do cell.[z] <- header.(j).[z] done;
Format.fprintf fmt "%s" cell
) first_row
let pp_row pp_cell fmt row =
Array.iteri (fun j cell ->
Format.pp_print_tab fmt ();
Format.fprintf fmt "%a" pp_cell cell
) row
The pretty printer for the table is pretty easy now. First we compute the width of the table, then we open the table box, we print the headers, we iterate on each row and we close the box. tadaaaa :)
let pp_tables pp_row fmt (header,table) =
(* we build with the largest length of each column of the
* table and header *)
let widths = Array.create (Array.length table.(0)) 0 in
Array.iter (fun row ->
Array.iteri (fun j cell ->
widths.(j) <- max (String.length cell) widths.(j)
) row
) table;
Array.iteri (fun j cell ->
widths.(j) <- max (String.length cell) widths.(j)
) header;
(* open the table box *)
Format.pp_open_tbox fmt ();
(* print the header *)
Format.fprintf fmt "%a@\n" (pp_header widths) header;
(* print the table *)
Array.iter (pp_row fmt) table;
(* close the box *)
Format.pp_close_tbox fmt ();
for example this is what we get :
let a = Array.make_matrix 3 4 "aaaaaaaa" in
let h = Array.make 4 "dddiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii" in
let fmt = Format.std_formatter in
Format.fprintf fmt "%a" (pp_tables (pp_row pp_cell)) (h,a);;
dddiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii dddiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii dddiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii dddiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii
aaaaaaaa aaaaaaaa aaaaaaaa aaaaaaaa
aaaaaaaa aaaaaaaa aaaaaaaa aaaaaaaa
aaaaaaaa aaaaaaaa aaaaaaaa aaaaaaaa
Well … more or less. On the terminal you will notice that everything is well aligned. This is of course only to scratch the surface. There are still few things I don’t really understand, and many functions that I didn’t consider at all. Maybe I’ll write a second chapter one day.