Programmer Passport: Elixir

Keyword Dictionaries

The first way to represent key-value data in Elixir is to use a combination of the data types we’ve seen so far. To do so, let’s think about the data structures we know about and how to use them.

Remember, tuples hold fixed-length data, where the position of the tuple determines how we treat it. Let’s represent a single key-value pair with a tuple. We’ll create atoms with a number’s name as the key, and the number itself as the value, like this:

iex> one = {:one, 1}
{:one, 1}
iex> two = {:two, 2}
{:two, 2}
iex> three = {:three, 3}
{:three, 3}

That’s a good start. We have a few key-value pairs. That’s not going to get us too far, though. We need to group the data together. Let’s use the only data structure ...