Programming Elixir ≥ 1.6

Familiar Yet Strange

String handling in Elixir is the result of a long evolutionary process in the underlying Erlang environment. If we were starting from scratch, things would probably look a little different. But once you get over the slightly strange way that strings are matched using binaries, you’ll find that it works out well. In particular, pattern matching makes it very easy to look to strings that start with a particular sequence, which in turn makes simple parsing tasks a pleasure to write.

You may have noticed that we’re a long way into the book and haven’t yet talked about control-flow constructs such as if and case. This is deliberate: we use them less often in Elixir than in more conventional languages. However, we still need them, ...