# Why so complex representation of a char?

**URL:** <https://discourse.julialang.org/t/why-so-complex-representation-of-a-char/17052>\
**Category:** General Usage\
**Created:** [November 1, 2018, 1:08pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/why-so-complex-representation-of-a-char/17052 "2018-11-01T13:08:03Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 47

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**Author:** ![DNF](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/dnf/32/10191_2.png) [@DNF](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/DNF)\
**Post date:** [November 14, 2018, 7:31am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/why-so-complex-representation-of-a-char/17052/47 "2018-11-14T07:31:24Z")

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> [@peters](#):
>
> Ok. It sounds you guys are ok with printing the 50 characters for one character 🙂

Yeah, there’s always quite a bit of meta information in these outputs, so it’s not a big deal to me.

But it does seem like something that could be configurable. I’ve seen some requests to mimic Matlab’s `format` command when printing numbers:

```julia
>> format short
>> a
a =
    0.0853

>> format long
>> a
a =
   0.085307484729089

```

which seems neat. Having an option like that, also for `Char`s, could be quite handy.

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