String Literals

Strings

Elixir has two kinds of strings: single-quoted and double-quoted. They differ significantly in their internal representation. But they also have many things in common. For example, see the following:

• Strings can hold characters in UTF-8 encoding.
• They may contain escape sequences:

  `\a`  BEL (0x07)      `\e`  ESC (0x1b)  
  `\v`  VT  (0x0b)      `\b`  BS  (0x08)  
  `\f`  FF  (0x0c)      `\s`  SP  (0x20)      
  `\d`  DEL (0x7f)      `\n`  NL  (0x0a)  
  `\t`  TAB (0x09)      `\r`  CR  (0x0d)  
  `\xhh`  2 hex digits 
  `\uhhh` 1–6 hex digits
  

• They allow interpolation on Elixir expressions using the syntax #{...}:

   iex> name = "dave"
   "Dave"
  
   iex> "Hello, #{String.capitalize name}!" 
   "Hello, Dave!"
  

• Characters that would otherwise have special meaning can be escaped with a backslash.
• They support heredocs.

Heredocs

Any string can span several lines. To illustrate this, we’ll use both IO.puts and IO.write. We use ...