Programming Phoenix 1.4

Using Helpers

That link function packs a surprising amount of punch into a small package. Phoenix helpers provide a convenient way to drop common HTML structures onto your view. There’s nothing special about them. Helpers are simply Elixir functions. For example, you can call the functions directly in IEx:

$ iex -S mix

iex> Phoenix.HTML.Link.link("Home", to: "/")
{:safe,  [60, "a", [[32, "href", 61, 34, "/", 34]],
62, "Home", 60,   47, "a", 62]}

The return value might look a little odd. We received a tuple with :safe, followed by an unusual looking list of values. This list is known as an I/O list. I/O lists are simply lists of values which allow data to be efficiently used for I/O, such as writing values to a socket. ...