Character Set
Since Erlang version R16B, Erlang source code files are assumed to be encoded in the UTF-8 character set. Prior to this, the ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1) character set was used. This means all UTF-8 printable characters can be used in source code files without using any escape sequences.
Internally Erlang has no character data type. Strings don’t really exist but instead are represented by lists of integers. Unicode strings can be represented by lists of integers without any problems.
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