you should not need to generate the tags manually. If you use any of the clojure type definition mechanisms they will be created by the printer. defrecord is particularly convenient for this.
(ns address-book)
(defrecord person [name])
(def people [(person. "Janet Wood")
(person. "Jack Tripper")
(person. "Chrissy Snow")])
address-book> (pr-str people)
"[#address_book.person{:name \"Janet Wood\"}
#address_book.person{:name \"Jack Tripper\"}
#address_book.person{:name \"Chrissy Snow\"}]"
if you want them formatted more nicely you can combine with-out-str
and clojure.pprint/pprint
. Using Clojure types to create the tags also gives you reading of those tags for free.
address-book> (read-string (pr-str people))
[#address_book.person{:name "Janet Wood"}
#address_book.person{:name "Jack Tripper"}
#address_book.person{:name "Chrissy Snow"}]
address-book> (def read-people (read-string (pr-str people)))
#'address-book/read-people
address-book> (type (first read-people))
address_book.person
The only downside I see is that you lose some control over the way the tags look if you have -'s in your namespace because java classes can't contain these so they get converted to underscores.