Question

I’m having a little trouble getting erlang to give me a unicode string.

Here’s what works:


io:format("~ts~n", [<<226,132,162>>]).
™
ok


But instead of printing to the console, I want to assign it to a variable. So I thought:


T = lists:flatten(io_lib:format("~ts~n", [<<226,132,162>>])).
T.
[8482,10]


How can I get T in the io_lib example to contain the ™ symbol so I can write it to a network stream?

Answer 1

Instead of assigning the flattened version to a variable for sending on the network, can you instead re-write your code that sends over the network to accept the binary in the first place and use the formatted write mechanism ~ts when sending over the socket?

That would also let you avoid the lists:flatten, which isn’t needed for the built-in IO mechanisms.