Category: 03. Elixir

Elixir provides excellent interoperability with Erlang libraries. Let us discuss a few libraries in brief. The Binary Module The built-in Elixir String module handles binaries that are UTF-8 encoded. The binary module is useful when you are dealing with binary data that is not necessarily UTF-8 encoded. Let us consider an example to further understand…

Elixir has three error mechanisms: errors, throws and exits. Let us explore each mechanism in detail. Error Errors (or exceptions) are used when exceptional things happen in the code. A sample error can be retrieved by trying to add a number into a string − When the above program is run, it produces the following…

List comprehensions are syntactic sugar for looping through enumerables in Elixir. In this chapter we will use comprehensions for iteration and generation. Basics When we looked at the Enum module in the enumerables chapter, we came across the map function. In this example, we will pass a function as the second argument. Each item in…

In this chapter, we are going to explore sigils, the mechanisms provided by the language for working with textual representations. Sigils start with the tilde (~) character which is followed by a letter (which identifies the sigil) and then a delimiter; optionally, modifiers can be added after the final delimiter. Regex Regexes in Elixir are…

In Elixir, all code runs inside processes. Processes are isolated from each other, run concurrent to one another and communicate via message passing. Elixir’s processes should not be confused with operating system processes. Processes in Elixir are extremely lightweight in terms of memory and CPU (unlike threads in many other programming languages). Because of this,…

Keyword lists are a convenient way to address content stored in lists by key, but underneath, Elixir is still walking through the list. That might be suitable if you have other plans for that list requiring walking through all of it, but it can be an unnecessary overhead if you are planning to use keys…

So far, we have not discussed any associative data structures, i.e., data structures that can associate a certain value (or multiple values) to a key. Different languages call these features with different names like dictionaries, hashes, associative arrays, etc. In Elixir, we have two main associative data structures: keyword lists and maps. In this chapter,…

(Linked) Lists A linked list is a heterogeneous list of elements that are stored at different locations in memory and are kept track of by using references. Linked lists are data structures especially used in functional programming. Elixir uses square brackets to specify a list of values. Values can be of any type − [1,…

A char list is nothing more than a list of characters. Consider the following program to understand the same. The above program generates the following result − Instead of containing bytes, a char list contains the code points of the characters between single-quotes. So while the double-quotes represent a string (i.e. a binary), singlequotes represent a…

Strings in Elixir are inserted between double quotes, and they are encoded in UTF-8. Unlike C and C++ where the default strings are ASCII encoded and only 256 different characters are possible, UTF-8 consists of 1,112,064 code points. This means that UTF-8 encoding consists of those many different possible characters. Since the strings use utf-8,…