Elixir:
Interpolating a string

How to:

name = "Josie"
age = 28

# Interpolating variables
greeting = "Hello, #{name}! You are #{age} years old."
IO.puts greeting

Sample output:

Hello, Josie! You are 28 years old.

# Interpolating expressions
IO.puts "In five years, #{name} will be #{age + 5} years old."

Sample output:

In five years, Josie will be 33 years old.

Deep Dive

In the early days, you’d glue strings together with + or ,. It was a pain. Languages then started to use interpolation for a cleaner, more readable approach. Elixir, being a modern language, also supports this feature natively.

Here’s what’s going on under the hood with "Hello, #{name}!": during compilation, Elixir transforms the string into a concatenation of binary parts, which is efficient because binaries in Elixir are immutable.

Alternative ways to handle strings without interpolation in Elixir might include using the String.concat/2 or the <> operator, but these methods are less ergonomic for complex strings.

The interpolation syntax "#{...}" can include any Elixir expression, which is evaluated and then converted to a string. This is possible due to Elixir being dynamically typed and having first-class support for expressions in its strings. But remember, it’s best kept for simpler expressions to maintain readability.

See Also

• Elixir’s String module documentation: https://hexdocs.pm/elixir/String.html
• A guide to Elixir’s binary data type: https://elixir-lang.org/getting-started/binaries-strings-and-char-lists.html