I’m trying to implement some functionality by pattern matching purely as a learning exercise to familiarize myself with bitstrings/charslists/binaries.

Imagine I want to write a function parse_symbol that takes the symbol for a security and parses it into it’s constituent parts.

A security symbol is a string that looks like this:
"NU 05/19/2023 4.50 P", or "AAPL 03/31/2023 145.00 C"

Each of those symbols is made up of {stock ticker} {expiration date} {strike price} {option type}

So AAPL 03/31/2023 145.00 C is an “apple call option, with a $145 strike price, and an expiration date of 03/31/2023”.

The stock ticker part is of variable length: it could be one character (F is the symbol for the Ford Motor Company) or multiple. The “Option type” could be "C" for a call option or "P" for a put.

It’s relatively simple to write a regex that parses out the components of the symbol. Is it possible to parse them out in a function head by pattern matching?

So something like:

def parse_symbol(<<ticker," ", month,"/",day,"/",year," ",strike," ",type>>) do
    %{ticker: ticker, strike: strike, type: type}
end

Warning: I know that the above code is probably broken/gobledeegook in all sorts of ways, I’m just trying to grok how binaries work