In Erlang, a string is a list of characters. The designers of Erlang
thoughtfully included a bit of syntactic sugar so that strings in
source code could be easily read. A string is written by enclosing
the characters with a doublequote ("). Some special characters must
be preceded by a backslash, these include doublequote and backslash.
The technique of marking special characters is called escaping and
backslash itself is called an escape character.
Examples of literal strings:
"Hello world""This string has a \" in it""This character \\ is a slash"
Since Erlang stores its strings as lists of characters, A = "Hello world". is exactly the same (to Erlang) as writing A = [72,101,108,108,111,32,119,111,114,108,100]. which is exactly the same as writing A = [$H,$e,$l,$l,$o,$ ,$w,$o,$r,$l,$d]..
In Erlang, strings are lists of characters (really, lists of integers). Since you can't talk about strings without talking about characters, you should know that Erlang supports the Basic Latin and Latin-1 Supplement, AKA ISO-8859-1.
Since Erlang stores all strings as a sequence of integers, it actually supports all of the Unicode character sets, since they simply map into a set of numbers. Unfortunately, Erlang does not currently support reading native unicode files or sorting in locale-specific ways based on unicode. However, there are plans to do this in the future.
You can specify a character with the sequence $ followed by the character, i.e.
