equivalent of pythons repr() in scala

Question

Is it there an equivalent of Pythons repr function in scala?

Ie a function which you can give any scala object an it will produce a string representation of the object which is valid scala code.

eg:

val l = List(Map(1 -> "a"))

print(repr(l))

Would produce

List(Map(1 -> "a"))

Answer 1

There is mostly only the toString method on every object. (Inherited from Java.) This may or may not result in a parseable representation. In most generic cases it probably won’t; there is no real convention for this as there is in Python but some of the collection classes at least try to. (As long as they are not infinite.)

The point where it breaks down is of course already reached when Strings are involved

"some string".toString == "some string"

however, for a proper representation, one would need

repr("some string") == "\"some string\""

As far as I know there is no such thing in Scala. Some of the serialisation libraries might be of some help for this, though.