I have been studying how to save files to the filesystem and I had some doubts related to the Erlang functions responsible to deal with binaries. For instance: def saveFile(path, file) do binary = :erlang.term_to_binary(file) end def loadFile(path) do {status, binary} = File.read(path) …

Yes, but beware that it will use External Term Format , not “human readable format”. EDIT: Not only it can be encoded into binary, it have to. Otherwise the Distributed Erlang couldn’t exist at all.

Term is any Erlang term . In other words, any value in Erlang is a term.

So any value can be converted to a binary?

yes, and they’re not kidding when they mean “any term”. For example, do this: f = fn x -> x + 1 end then save the term in f to a file. Close your elixir session, start a new one, open the file into a variable f in your new session and then do this: f.(4)

Elixir Programming Language Forum

What is a term?

Questions & Help Questions

LauraBeatris June 27, 2020, 9:14pm 5

Alrighttt, now i understand it. Thanks!!