Assign splited string to array in elixir - string

Question

I am new in elixir development. I have problem with parsing of string in elixir. Assume that I have string "Hello World from the hell". I know that I can split this like this String.split("Hello World from the hell"). I would like to know is the anyway to assign element of this string to list in elixir?

Answer 1

String.split/1 returns a list - one of Elixir's fundamental data structures, along with maps and tuples. A list is your go-to basic collection in Elixir. Even though internally it's a linked list, you can perform all sorts of operations on it using functions from the Enum module:
$ iex
iex(1)> ls = String.split("Hello World from the hell")
["Hello", "World", "from", "the", "hell"]
iex(2)> i ls
Term
["Hello", "World", "from", "the", "hell"]
Data type
List
Reference modules
List
iex(3)> Enum.take(ls, 2)
["Hello", "World"]
iex(4)> Enum.at(ls, 4)
"hell"
iex(5)> [l0, l1, l2, l3, l4] = ls
["Hello", "World", "from", "the", "hell"]
iex(6)> l4
"hell"
iex(7)> Enum.take(ls, 4) ++ ["iex", "shell"]
["Hello", "World", "from", "the", "iex", "shell"]
As you can see Enum.at/3 gives you something similar to the a[i] style array access.
If you're worried about the efficiency of finding an element in your list - for example your input string is going to be something much longer than "Hello World from the hell" and you'll be getting elements from it by index many times, essentially traversing it each time, you can build a map from it instead, and look the words by indices efficiently:
iex(8)> with_indices = Enum.with_index(ls)
[{"Hello", 0}, {"World", 1}, {"from", 2}, {"the", 3}, {"hell", 4}]
iex(9)> indices_and_words = Enum.map(with_indices, fn({a, b}) -> {b, a} end)
[{0, "Hello"}, {1, "World"}, {2, "from"}, {3, "the"}, {4, "hell"}]
iex(10)> map = Map.new(indices_and_words)
%{0 => "Hello", 1 => "World", 2 => "from", 3 => "the", 4 => "hell"}
iex(11)> map[0]
"Hello"
iex(12)> map[4]
"hell"