Programming Elixir

The Name “strings”

Before we get further into this, I need to explain something. In most other languages, you’d call ’cat’ and "cat" both strings. And that’s what I’ve been doing so far. But Elixir has a different convention.

In Elixir, the convention is that we call only double-quoted strings “strings.” The single-quoted form is a character list.

This is important. The single- and double-quoted forms are very different, and libraries that work on strings work only on the double-quoted form.

Let’s explore the differences in more detail.