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Programming Elixir
book

Programming Elixir

by Dave Thomas
October 2014
Intermediate to advanced
280 pages
7h 20m
English
Pragmatic Bookshelf
Content preview from Programming Elixir

case

case lets you test a value against a set of patterns, executes the code associated with the first one that matches, and returns the value of that code. The patterns may include guard clauses.

For example, the File.open function returns a two-element tuple. If the open is successful, it returns {:ok, file}, where file is an identifier for the open file. If the open fails, it returns {:error, reason}. We can use case to take the appropriate action when we open a file. (In this case the code opens its own source file.)

control/case.ex
 
case​ File.open(​"case.ex"​) ​do
 
{ :ok, file } ->
 
IO.puts ​"First line: #{IO.read(file, :line)}"
 
{ :error, reason } ->
 
IO.puts ​"Failed to open file: #{reason}"
 
end

produces:

 
First line: case File.open("case.ex") ...
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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781680500530Errata Page