List and Enumeration Basics
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Four Important Friends
There are three Elixir modules that you'll use most often when working with lists of data: Enum
, List
and Keyword
:
-
Enum
does enumeration functions. Mapping data, filtering, finding, grouping... things like that. This module is absolutely fundamental; get to know it! -
List
handles list-specific operations whereasEnum
will work with anything that you iterate over (or that is enumerable). Inserting, deleting, first and last - theList
module is another that you'll want to know well. - As you might suspect,
Keyword
does a lot of whatList
does, but for keyword lists.
In addition to these, Elixir supports list comprehensions. This is syntactic sugar for iterating over enumerable structures, but comes with built-in filters and the unique ability to have more than one generator. We'll get to these last - they can be quite complicated.