Interactive Elixir Shell¶

Learn how to interact with the interactive shell and get started.

IEx¶

To enter the interactive shell open your terminal and type the following

For mac, freeBSD or linux -

$ iex
iex(1)>

For windows -

c:\> iex.bat
iex(1)>

Interactive shell provides a convenience method for using elixir. Let's try to explore it.

iex(1)> IO.puts("Hello, World")

You get back a response -

Hello, World
:ok

Don't worry about :ok, its called as an atom and we will come back to it later. To exit the IEx press ctrl-c twice.

Helper Functions¶

IEx provides all sorts of helper function, we will see them as required in future tutorials, for now again open the IEx and type the following -

iex(1)>i 43

What output do you see?

Term
  43
Data type
  Integer
Reference modules
  Integer
Implemented protocols
  IEx.Info, Inspect, List.Chars, String.Chars

Using the flag i the interactive shell provided you with a lot of data, lets try putting something else this time.

iex(2)> i "Hello, World"

Output

Term
  "Hello, World"
Data type
  BitString
Byte size
  12
Description
  This is a string: a UTF-8 encoded binary. It's printed surrounded by
  "double quotes" because all UTF-8 encoded code points in it are printable.
Raw representation
  <<72, 101, 108, 108, 111, 44, 32, 87, 111, 114, 108, 100>>
Reference modules
  String, :binary
Implemented protocols
  Collectable, IEx.Info, Inspect, List.Chars, String.Chars

Notice the Data type is showing BitString this time, earlier for 43 the data type was Integer, IEx is trying to help by providing all the information that it available.

Exercises¶

Now, its time for some fun exercises, type the following and see what output do you get

iex(1)> i 'a'
iex(2)> i 2.56
iex(3)> i :hello
iex(4)> i true

Just read all the outputs, you are not required to understand everything just yet, but try to read and make sense of the output.

Don't skip the exercises if you really want to learn Elixir! However simple they may seem, its important to try them out yourself!

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