Take the 2-minute tour ×  Is there a way to show the complete
internal structure of an R object in an unambiguous and human
readable way?  The str function doesn't exactly do this, as it
shows custom representations. For example, applying it to an
igraph object gives something like  IGRAPH U--- 3 3 -- Full
graph + attr: name (g/c), loops (g/x) + edges: [1] 1--2 1--3 2--
3  This is nice and readable, but it's specific to igraph
objects (it's clear that it uses a custom formatting for them).
I'm looking for something general. I found dput, and for a while
I thought that this provides complete information. The same
igraph object is shown as  structure(list(3, FALSE, c(1, 2, 2),
c(0, 0, 1), c(0, 1, 2),      c(0, 1, 2), c(0, 0, 1, 3), c(0, 2,
3, 3), list(c(1, 0, 1),          structure(list(name = "Full
graph", loops = FALSE), .Names = c("name",          "loops")),
list(), list())), class = "igraph")  But then I read about
pairlists in the R Language Definition and I noticed that
dput(pairlist(1,2)) gives list(1,2).