Programming Erlang, 2nd Edition

Strings

Strictly speaking, there are no strings in Erlang. To represent a string in Erlang, we can choose between representing the string as a list of integers or as a binary (for a discussion of binaries, see ​Binaries​). When a string is represented as a list of integers, each element in the list represents a Unicode codepoint.

We can create such a list by using a string literal. A string literal is just a sequence of characters enclosed in double quotation marks ("), so, for example, we can write this:

"Hello" is just shorthand for the list of integer character codes that represent the individual characters in that string.

Note: In some programming languages, strings can be quoted with either single or double ...