An atom is a literal, a constant with name. An atom is to be enclosed in single quotes (”) if it does not begin with a lower-case letter or if it contains other characters than alphanumeric characters, underscore (_), or @.
The following program is an example of how atoms can be used in Erlang. This program declares 3 atoms, atom1, atom_1 and ‘atom 1’ respectively. So you can see the different ways an atom can be declared.
Example
-module(helloworld). -export([start/0]). start() -> io:fwrite(atom1), io:fwrite("~n"), io:fwrite(atom_1), io:fwrite("~n"), io:fwrite(''atom 1''), io:fwrite("~n").
The output of the above program would be follows −
Output
atom1 atom_1 atom 1
Let’s see some of the methods available in Erlang to work with atoms.
Sr.No. | Methods and Description |
---|---|
1 |
This method is used to determine if a term is indeed an atom. |
2 |
This method is used to convert an atom to a list. |
3 |
This method is used to convert a list item to an atom. |
4 |
This method is used to convert an atom to a binary value. |
5 |
This method is used to convert a binary value to an atom value. |