Programming Elixir 1.2

Writing Your Own Sigils

You know by now that you can create strings and regular-expression literals using sigils:

string = ~s{now is the time}
regex  = ~r{..h..}

Have you ever wished you could extend these sigils to add your own specific literal types? You can.

When you write a sigil such as ~s{...}, Elixir converts it into a call to the function sigil_s. It passes the function two values. The first is the string between the delimiters. The second is a list containing any lowercase letters that immediately follow the closing delimiter. (This second parameter is used to pick up any options you pass to a regex literal, such as ~r/cat/if.)

Here’s the implementation of a sigil ~l that takes a multiline string and returns a list containing ...