2 Basic types

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In this chapter we will learn more about Elixir basic types: integers, floats, booleans, atoms, strings, lists and tuples. Some basic types are:

iex> 1          # integer
iex> 0x1F       # integer
iex> 1.0        # float
iex> true       # boolean
iex> :atom      # atom / symbol
iex> "elixir"   # string
iex> [1, 2, 3]  # list
iex> {1, 2, 3}  # tuple

2.1 Basic arithmetic

Open up iex and type the following expressions:

iex> 1 + 2
3
iex> 5 * 5
25
iex> 10 / 2
5.0

Notice that 10 / 2 returned a float 5.0 instead of an integer 5. This is expected. In Elixir, the operator / always returns a float. If you want to do integer division or get the division remainder, you can invoke the div and rem functions:

iex> div(10, 2)
5
iex> div 10, 2
5
iex> rem 10, 3
1

Notice that parentheses are not required in order to invoke a function.

Elixir also supports shortcut notations for entering binary, octal and hexadecimal numbers:

iex> 0b1010
10
iex> 0o777
511
iex> 0x1F
31

Float numbers require a dot followed by at least one digit and also support e for the exponent number:

iex> 1.0
1.0
iex> 1.0e-10
1.0e-10

Floats in Elixir are 64 bit double precision.

You can invoke the round function to get the closest integer to a given float, or the trunc function to get the integer part of a float.

iex> round 3.58
4
iex> trunc 3.58
3

2.2 Booleans

Elixir supports true and false as booleans:

iex> true
true
iex> true == false
false

Elixir provides a bunch of predicate functions to check for a value type. For example, the is_boolean/1 function can be used to check if a value is a boolean or not:

Note: Functions in Elixir are identified by name and by number of arguments (i.e. arity). Therefore, is_boolean/1 identifies a function named is_boolean that takes 1 argument. is_boolean/2 identifies a different (nonexistent) function with the same name but different arity.

iex> is_boolean(true)
true
iex> is_boolean(1)
false

You can also use is_integer/1, is_float/1 or is_number/1 to check, respectively, if an argument is an integer, a float or either.

Note: At any moment you can type h in the shell to print information on how to use the shell. The h helper can also be used to access documentation for any function. For example, typing h is_integer/1 is going to print the documentation for the is_integer/1 function. It also works with operators and other constructs (try h ==/2).

2.3 Atoms

Atoms are constants where their name is their own value. Some other languages call these symbols:

iex> :hello
:hello
iex> :hello == :world
false

The booleans true and false are, in fact, atoms:

iex> true == :true
true
iex> is_atom(false)
true
iex> is_boolean(:false)
true

2.4 Strings

Strings in Elixir are inserted between double quotes, and they are encoded in UTF-8:

iex> "hellö"
"hellö"

Note: if you are running on Windows, there is a chance your terminal
does not use UTF-8 by default. You can change the encoding of your
current session by running ``chcp 65001``.

Elixir also supports string interpolation:

iex> "hellö #{:world}"
"hellö world"

Strings can have line breaks in them or introduce them using escape sequences:

iex> "hello
...> world"
"hello\nworld"
iex> "hello\nworld"
"hello\nworld"

You can print a string using the IO.puts/1 function from the IO module:

iex> IO.puts "hello\nworld"
hello
world
:ok

Notice the IO.puts/1 function returns the atom :ok as result after printing.

Strings in Elixir are represented internally by binaries which are sequences of bytes:

iex> is_binary("hellö")
true

We can also get the number of bytes in a string:

iex> byte_size("hellö")
6

Notice the number of bytes in that string is 6, even though it has 5 characters. That’s because the character “ö” takes 2 bytes to be represented in UTF-8. We can get the actual length of the string, based on the number of characters, by using the String.length/1 function:

iex> String.length("hellö")
5

The String module contains a bunch of functions that operate on strings as defined in the Unicode standard:

iex> String.upcase("hellö")
"HELLÖ"

2.5 Anonymous functions

Functions are delimited by the keywords fn and end:

iex> add = fn a, b -> a + b end
#Function<12.71889879/2 in :erl_eval.expr/5>
iex> is_function(add)
true
iex> is_function(add, 2)
true
iex> is_function(add, 1)
false
iex> add.(1, 2)
3

Functions are “first class citizens” in Elixir meaning they can be passed as arguments to other functions just as integers and strings can. In the example, we have passed the function in the variable add to the is_function/1 function which correctly returned true. We can also check the arity of the function by calling is_function/2.

Note a dot (.) between the variable and parenthesis is required to invoke an anonymous function.

Anonymous functions are closures, and as such they can access variables that are in scope when the function is defined:

iex> add_two = fn a -> add.(a, 2) end
#Function<6.71889879/1 in :erl_eval.expr/5>
iex> add_two.(2)
4

Keep in mind that a variable assigned inside a function does not affect its surrounding environment:

iex> x = 42
42
iex> (fn -> x = 0 end).()
0
iex> x
42

2.6 (Linked) Lists

Elixir uses square brackets to specify a list of values. Values can be of any type:

iex> [1, 2, true, 3]
[1, 2, true, 3]
iex> length [1, 2, 3]
3

Two lists can be concatenated and subtracted using the ++/2 and --/2 operators:

iex> [1, 2, 3] ++ [4, 5, 6]
[1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]
iex> [1, true, 2, false, 3, true] -- [true, false]
[1, 2, 3, true]

Throughout the tutorial, we will talk a lot about the head and tail of a list. The head is the first element of a list and the tail is the remainder of a list. They can be retrieved with the functions hd/1 and tl/1. Let’s assign a list to a variable and retrieve its head and tail:

iex> list = [1,2,3]
iex> hd(list)
1
iex> tl(list)
[2, 3]

Getting the head or the tail of an empty list is an error:

iex> hd []
** (ArgumentError) argument error

Sometimes you will create a list and it will return a value in single-quotes. For example:

iex> [11, 12, 13]
'\v\f\r'
iex> [104, 101, 108, 108, 111]
'hello'

When Elixir sees a list of printable ASCII numbers, Elixir will print that as a char list (literally a list of characters). Char lists are quite common when interfacing with existing Erlang code.

Keep in mind single-quoted and double-quoted representations are not equivalent in Elixir as they are represented by different types:

iex> 'hello' == "hello"
false

Single-quotes are char lists, double-quotes are strings. We will talk more about them in the “Binaries, strings and char lists” chapter.

2.7 Tuples

Elixir uses curly brackets to define tuples. Like lists, tuples can hold any value:

iex> {:ok, "hello"}
{:ok, "hello"}
iex> tuple_size {:ok, "hello"}
2

Tuples store elements contiguously in memory. This means accessing a tuple element per index or getting the tuple size is a fast operation (indexes start from zero):

iex> tuple = {:ok, "hello"}
{:ok, "hello"}
iex> elem(tuple, 1)
"hello"
iex> tuple_size(tuple)
2

It is also possible to set an element at a particular index in a tuple with put_elem/3:

iex> tuple = {:ok, "hello"}
{:ok, "hello"}
iex> put_elem(tuple, 1, "world")
{:ok, "world"}
iex> tuple
{:ok, "hello"}

Notice that put_elem/3 returned a new tuple. The original tuple stored in the tuple variable was not modified because Elixir data types are immutable. By being immutable, Elixir code is easier to reason about as you never need to worry if a particular code is mutating your data structure in place.

By being immutable, Elixir also helps eliminate common cases where concurrent code has race conditions because two different entities are trying to change a data structure at the same time.

2.8 Lists or tuples?

What is the difference between lists and tuples?

Lists are stored in memory as linked lists, meaning that each element in a list holds its value and points to the following element until the end of the list is reached. We call each pair of value and pointer a cons cell:

iex> list = [1|[2|[3|[]]]]
[1, 2, 3]

This means accessing the length of a list is a linear operation: we need to traverse the whole list in order to figure out its size. Updating a list is fast as long as we are prepending elements:

iex> [0] ++ list
[0, 1, 2, 3]
iex> list ++ [4]
[1, 2, 3, 4]

The first operation is fast because we are simply adding a new cons that points to the remaining of list. The second one is slow because we need to rebuild the whole list and add a new element to the end.

Tuples, on the other hand, are stored contiguously in memory. This means getting the tuple size or accessing an element by index is fast. However, updating or adding elements to tuples is expensive because it requires copying the whole tuple in memory.

Those performance characteristics dictate the usage of those data structures. One very common use case for tuples is to use them to return extra information from a function. For example, File.read/1 is a function that can be used to read file contents and it returns tuples:

iex> File.read("path/to/existing/file")
{:ok, "... contents ..."}
iex> File.read("path/to/unknown/file")
{:error, :enoent}

If the path given to File.read/1 exists, it returns a tuple with the atom :ok as the first element and the file contents as the second. Otherwise, it returns a tuple with :error and the error description.

Most of the time, Elixir is going to guide you to do the right thing. For example, there is a elem/2 function to access a tuple item but there is no built-in equivalent for lists:

iex> tuple = {:ok, "hello"}
{:ok, "hello"}
iex> elem(tuple, 1)
"hello"

When “counting” the number of elements in a data structure, Elixir also abides by a simple rule: the function should be named size if the operation is in constant time (i.e. the value is pre-calculated) or length if the operation requires explicit counting.

For example, we have used 4 counting functions so far: byte_size/1 (for the number of bytes in a string), tuple_size/1 (for the tuple size), length/1 (for the list length) and String.length/1 (for the number of characters in a string). That said, we use byte_size to get the number of bytes in a string, which is cheap, but retrieving the number of unicode characters uses String.length, since the whole string needs to be iterated.

Elixir also provides Port, Reference and PID as data types (usually used in process communication), and we will take a quick look at them when talking about processes. For now, let’s take a look at some of the basic operators that go with our basic types.