10 killer Elixir Tips #2

1 — Code Grouping

Code grouping stands for something great. It shows you how your code is grouped when you write multiple lines of code in single line with out using braces. It will be more clear with the following example.

one 1 |> two()

If you want to see how this line of code is grouped into, you can check in the following format..

quote(do: one 1 |> two()) |> Macro.to_string |> IO.puts
one(1 |> two())

So, by using the code and Macro.to_string you can see how our code is grouped.

2 — Elixir Short Circuit Operators && — ||

These replaces the nested complicated conditions. These are my best friends in the situations dealing with more complex comparisons. Trust me you gonna love this.

The || operator always returns the first expression which is true. Elixir doesn’t care about the remaining expressions, and won’t evaluate them after a match has been found.

||

false || nil || :blackode || :elixir || :jose

Here, if you observe the first expression, it is false next nil is also false in elixir, next :blackode which evaluates to true and its value is returned immediately with out evaluating the :elixir and :jose . Similarly if all the statements evaluates to false the last expression is returned.

&&

iex> true && :true && :elixir && 5
5
iex> nil && 100
nil
iex> salary = is_login && is_admin && is_staff && 100_000

This && returns the second expression if the first expression is true or else it returns the first expression with out evaluating the second expression. In the above examples the last one is the situation where we encounter to use the && operator.

3 — Comparing two different data types

I have self experience with this . When I am novice in elixir, I just compared "5" > 4 unknowingly by an accident and to my surprise it returned with true.

In Elixir every term can compare with every other term. So one has to be careful in comparisons.

iex> x = "I am x "
"I am x "
iex> x > 34
true
iex> x > [1,2,3]
true
iex> [1,2,3] < 1234567890
false

4 — Arithmetic Operators as Lambda functions

When I see this first time, I said to my self “Elixir is Crazy” . This tip really saves time and it resembles your smartness. In Elixir every operator is a macro. So, we can use them as lambda functions.

iex> Enum.reduce([1,2,3], 0, &+/2)
6
iex> Enum.reduce([1,2,3], 0, &*/2)
0
iex> Enum.reduce([1,2,3], 3, &*/2)
18
iex> Enum.reduce([1,2,3], 3, &-/2)
-1
iex> Enum.reduce([1,2,3], 3, &//2)
0.5

5 — Binary pattern matching

This is my recent discovery. I always encounter a situation like converting "$34.56" which is a string and I suppose do arithmetic operations. I usually do something like this before binary pattern matching…

value =
 "$34.56"
 |> String.split("$")
 |> tl
 |> List.first
 |> String.to_float

 # Live Execution in IEx

iex> value =
      "$34.56"
      |> String.split("$")
      |> tl
      |> List.first
      |> String.to_float

34.56           #output

Tip Approach

This tip made my day easy. I recently used this is in one of my projects.

"$" <> value = "$34.56"
String.to_float value

iex> "$" <> value = "$34.56"
"$34.56"

iex> String.to_float value  
34.56

6 — Recompiling Project

At beginning stage, I used to press ^c ^c twice and restart shell as iex -S mix whenever I make changes to the project files. If you are doing this now, stop it right now. You can just recompile the project.

iex -S mix
iex> recompile()

7 — Logger Module

Logger is one of my favorite modules. It’s a default module and starts along with your application. You have to just require this module. When I am new to Elixir, I always used to write the console outputs as IO.puts "This is value of data" for code debugging but, those lines get mixed up with other lines of information and It became hard to trace those lines.

This Logger module solved my problem. It has many features but, I use three definitions very often warn info and error. Each definition prints the information with different colors which is easier to find the debug information at a glance.

The best part of module is to print along with the time. It means, printing the time at execution moment. So, you can know the order of statements execution.

Before using the Logger module one has to do require Logger so, all macros will be loaded inside your working module.

iex> require Logger
Logger

iex> Logger.info "This is the info"
15:04:33.102 [info]  This is the info
:ok

iex> Logger.warn "This is warning"
15:04:56.712 [warn]  This is warning
:ok

iex> Logger.error "This is error"
15:05:19.570 [error] This is error
:ok

8 — Finding All Started Applications

We can check the all the applications which are started along with our application. Sometimes we have to check whether a particular application is started or not. So, it helps you in those situations.

If you are a beginner, you don’t feel of using this much. But I am pretty sure of this tip will become handy when you work with multiple applications.

iex> Application.started_applications

[{:logger, 'logger', '1.4.0'}, {:iex, 'iex', '1.4.0'},
 {:elixir, 'elixir', '1.4.0'}, {:compiler, 'ERTS  CXC 138 10', '7.0.1'},
 {:stdlib, 'ERTS  CXC 138 10', '3.0.1'}, {:kernel, 'ERTS  CXC 138 10', '5.0.1'}]

9 — Advantage of Map keys as :atoms and binary(strings)

Before I let you to use this tip, I just want to remind you that :atoms are not garbage collected. Atom keys are great! If you have a fixed number of them defined statically in your code, you are in no danger.

You should not convert user supplied input into atoms without sanitizing them first because it can lead to out of memory.

But, you can use the . to retrieve the data from the keys as map.key unlike the usual notation like map["key"] . That really saves the typing. But, I don’t encourage this because, as a programmer we should really care about memory.

iex> map = %{name: "blackode", blog: "medium"}
%{blog: "medium", name: "blackode"}

iex> map.name
"blackode"

iex> map.blog
"medium"

Be sure that when you try to retrieve a key with . form which is not present in the map, it will raise a key error instead of returning the nil unlike the map["key"] which returns nil if key is not present in map.

iex> map["age"]
nil

iex> map.age
Bug Bug ..!!** (KeyError) key :age not found in: %{blog: "medium", name: "blackode"}
Bug Bug ..!!

10. Color Printing

Elixir >=1.4.0 has ANSI color printing option to console. You can have great fun with colors. You can also provide background colors.

iex> import IO.ANSI

iex> IO.puts red <> "red"<>green<>" green" <> yellow <> " yellow" <>   reset <> " normal"
red green yellow normal

The red prints in red color, green in green color, yellow in yellow color and normal in white. Have fun with colors…

For more details on color printing check Printex module which I created for fun in Elixir.

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WRITTEN BY

Blackode