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[edit] Problem

You want to convert an atom to a string or vice versa

[edit] Solution

The built-in function list_to_atom converts from a string to an atom, and atom_to_list does the conversion in the other direction.

1> list_to_atom("hello").
hello
2> atom_to_list(hello).
"hello"

Note that by default Erlang is case sensitive, so the atom hello, Hello and HeLLo are unique:

1> hello = hEllo.
** exited: {{badmatch,hEllo},[{erl_eval,expr,3}]} **
2> hello = hello.
hello