You have two -- charlists like you're describing, which are just linked lists of characters under the hood and UTF-8 binaries. Charlists are denoted with single

You have two -- charlists like you're describing, which are just linked lists of characters under the hood and UTF-8 binaries. Charlists are denoted with single quotes and the UTF-8 ones are denoted with double quotes. Truthfully, I reach for the UTF-8 ones most of the time, but you can get some good performance gains in e.g. template string building in web frameworks if you use charlists. In Erlang, all the strings work like charlists FWIU, so they need to exist at least in some capacity for interop reasons. http://elixir-lang.org/getting-started/binaries-strings-and-char-lists.html http://elixir-lang.org/getting-started/binaries-strings-and-...