In this guide, we will discuss Erlang Atoms. An atom is a literal, a constant with name. An atom is to be enclosed in single quotes (‘) if it does not begin with a lower-case letter or if it contains other characters than alphanumeric characters, underscore (_), or @.
The following program is an example of how atoms can be used in Erlang. This program declares 3 atoms, atom1, atom_1 and ‘atom 1’ respectively. So you can see the different ways an atom can be declared.
Example
-module(helloworld).
-export([start/0]).
start() ->
io:fwrite(atom1),
io:fwrite("~n"),
io:fwrite(atom_1),
io:fwrite("~n"),
io:fwrite('atom 1'),
io:fwrite("~n").
The output of the above program would be follows −
Output
atom1 atom_1 atom 1
Let’s see some of the methods available in Erlang to work with atoms.
| Sr.No. | Methods and Description |
|---|---|
| 1 | is_atom This method is used to determine if a term is indeed an atom. |
| 2 | atom_to_list This method is used to convert an atom to a list. |
| 3 | list_to_atom This method is used to convert a list item to an atom. |
| 4 | atom_to_binary This method is used to convert an atom to a binary value. |
| 5 | binary_to_atom This method is used to convert a binary value to an atom value. |
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