Controlling the Display of Large Expressions
When you do symbolic calculations, it is quite easy to end up with extremely complicated expressions. Often, you will not even want to
see the complete result of a computation.
If you end your input with a semicolon,
Mathematica will do the computation you asked for, but will not display the result. You can nevertheless use
% or
Out[n] to refer to the result.
By default, the
Mathematica front end will display any outputs which are excessively large in a shortened form inside an interface which allows you to refine the display of the output.
Mathematica shows this output with 5138 of the terms omitted.
| Out[1]= |  |
|
The
Show Less and
Show More buttons allow you to decrease or increase the level of detail to which
Mathematica shows the expression. The
Show Full Output button removes the interface entirely and displays the full result, but the result may take considerable time to display. The default threshold size at which this feature starts working may be set using the
Set Size Limit option, which opens the
Preferences dialog to the panel with the appropriate setting.
The large output suppression feature is implemented using the
Mathematica function
Short. You can use
Short directly for finer control over the display of expressions. You can also use it for outputs which are not large enough to be suppressed by the default suppression scheme.
Ending your input with ; stops Mathematica from displaying the complicated result of the computation. |
You can still refer to the result as %. //Short displays a one-line outline of the result. The <<n>> stands for n terms that have been left out.
Out[3]//Short= |
| |  |
|
This shows a three-line version of the expression. More parts are now visible.
Out[4]//Short= |
| |  |
|
This gives the total number of terms in the sum.
| Out[5]= |  |
|
| command; | execute command, but do not print the result |
| expr//Short | show a one-line outline form of expr |
| Short[expr,n] | show an n-line outline of expr |
Some ways to shorten your output.
