Course of Raku / Advanced / Debugging / Turning values into text

The .gist method

The .gist method returns a human-friendly representation of a value — the form you would want to read. This is exactly what say (and note) print: they call .gist on each argument.

say 42.gist;     # 42
say 'Raku'.gist; # Raku

For simple values the gist is just the value itself. For compound data, .gist adds a little formatting so the structure stays readable:

my @a = 'alpha', 'beta', 'gamma';
say @a.gist; # [alpha beta gamma]

A type object — a value that stands for the type itself — gists as its name in parentheses, which makes it easy to spot in the output:

say Int.gist; # (Int)

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