Saving Matrices/Lists as Strings

Question

I would like to save .txt file with string matrices, possibly doing some string replacement the matrices delimiters and arranging output for symbolic expressions. For example:

matrix = {{a,b1 b2},{c1/c2,d}}

And I would like to output this to a txt file in the format

"((a,b1*b2),(c1/c2,d))"

Output is more crucial here since I can replace it later using some other tool, but I would assume replacing such strings would also be easy from within Mathematica? Also I reckon that the "space" representation of multiplicatoin might be a bit tricky?

Thanks

Answer 1

The essence of this method is to realize that InputForm matches quite well your desired format. This format is supported by ToString, so both

ToString[b1 b2, InputForm]

b1*b2

and

ToString[c1/c2, InputForm]

c1/c2

work as desired. Hence one way is:

matrix = {{a,b1 b2},{c1/c2,d}};
stringmatrix = 
 StringReplace[ToString[matrix, InputForm], {"{" -> "(", "}" -> ")"}]

((a, b1*b2), (c1/c2, d))

Export["matrix.txt", stringmatrix]

Note that this will contain whitespaces, so you might want to delete those. You can do this by adding Whitespace -> "" to the list of replacement rules in StringReplace.