List of strings to binary and back again

Question

I've stumbled on a quite irritating problem;

I'm trying to generate a binary of a string-list and back again. Eg

erlang:binary_to_list(erlang:list_to_binary(["hello", "world"])

This will return "helloworld" and not a list with two different elements. Does anyone have any ideas of how to solve this? One solution might be to encode every element, but there might be a more elegant solution for this?

Answer 1

Yes, you have to encode it somehow. Here's the simplest way to do it by encoding it into Erlang binary term format

erlang:binary_to_term(erlang:term_to_binary(["hello", "world"]))

Answer 2

Strings are merely a list of ints in erlang those the concat done by list_to_binary.