fireproofsocks
Why is the output of single-quoted strings sometimes numbers, sometimes just the string?
Can someone explain this behavior?
iex> 'hełło'
[104, 101, 322, 322, 111]
iex> 'hello'
'hello'
Why isn’t there a consistent output? If single-quoted strings are character lists, why are the code points only revealed when the string contains multi-byte characters? How can I see the internal integer codepoints of any single-quoted string?
Strings/charlists are confusing enough without the obfuscation. Could someone shed light on this?
Marked As Solved
fireproofsocks
The <<0>> null-byte trick is good, but I think you have to adapt its syntax when working with character lists:
iex> 'hello' ++ [0]
[104, 101, 108, 108, 111, 0]
The charlists: :as_lists is the most helpful option here:
iex> IO.inspect('hello', charlists: :as_lists)
[104, 101, 108, 108, 111]
It’s the counterpart to the binaries: :as_binaries when working with binaries:
iex(10)> IO.inspect("hello", binaries: :as_binaries)
<<104, 101, 108, 108, 111>>
"hello"
Also Liked
LostKobrakai
In particular, charlists will be printed back by default in single quotes if they contain only printable ASCII characters
rvirding
The reason for sometimes printing lists of integers as ' ' strings is that this is how strings are represented in Erlang, as lists of unicode codepoints. And the reason for this is that there is no string datatype in the BEAM, no character datatype either for that matter. So we fake strings.
In Erlang with lists of integers, which is a “classic” way of doing it in functional languages, and in Elixir with binaries containing UTF-8 encode chararcters.
iex(8)> "abc"
"abc"
iex(9)> "abc" <> <<0>>
<<97, 98, 99, 0>>
iex(10)> "a™b"
"a™b"
iex(11)> "a™b" <> <<0>>
<<97, 226, 132, 162, 98, 0>>
using the append a 0 trick to show the internals.
It’s a hard life. 
Popular in Questions
Other popular topics
Latest on Elixir Forum
Sponsor Spotlight
Courses that'll move you from confusion to "Aha, now I get it!"
Categories:
Sub Categories:
Forums
Our Sponsors
Build Elixir applications with speed and confidence.
Supporting innovation across the BEAM ecosystem.
We build reliable cloud platforms for business-critical systems.
Catch errors, track performance, monitor hosts and more.
Producing high quality Elixir screencasts since 2017.
Enabling companies to succeed by building software people love.
The deployment platform built for Elixir: PaaS ease, VPS control.
Courses that'll move you from confusion to "Aha, now I get it!"