Sigils

1. Regular expressions
2. Strings, char lists and words sigils
   1. Strings
   2. Char lists
   3. Word lists
3. Interpolation and escaping in sigils
4. Custom sigils

We have already learned that Elixir provides double-quoted strings and single-quoted char lists. However, this only covers the surface of structures that have textual representation in the language. Atoms, for example, are mostly created via the :atom representation.

One of Elixir’s goals is extensibility: developers should be able to extend the language to fit any particular domain. Computer science has become such a wide field that it is impossible for a language to tackle many fields as part of its core. Rather, our best bet is to make the language extensible, so developers, companies and communities can extend the language to their relevant domains.

In this chapter, we are going to explore sigils, which are one of the mechanisms provided by the language for working with textual representations. Sigils start with the tilde (~) character which is followed by a letter (which identifies the sigil) and then a delimiter; optionally, modifiers can be added after the final delimiter.