How to make IEx print strings instead of charlists

Questions / Help
1

Hi , Trying to understand why

Phoenix.HTML.Link.link("Home", to: '/')
is returning
{:safe, [60, "a", [[32, "href", 61, 34, "/", 34]], 62, "Home", 60, 47, "a", 62]}
instead of
{:safe, ["<a href=\"/\">", "Home", "</a>"]}
like I would expect.

I’m gathering that it’s showing the char codes, but also the nested arrays are throwing me off too.

Thanks for the help!

Steve

2

Hello and welcome,

It is because Phoenix templates use IO list for optimization…

See this post for more information.

1 Like
3

Thanks for the helpful link. To test my theory I ran

List.to_string elem(Phoenix.HTML.Link.link("Home", to: '/'),1)

and got what I was loooking for.

4

You can use just to_string btw.

1 Like
5

Note that single quotes are for charlists. So the '/' you are passing in is not a string but a charlist. It’s a bit odd that it works at all, but when interfacing with Elixir libraries you should use double quoted string literals.

3 Likes