Batteries Included
The list of modules that comes with Erlang is extensive. It can be hard for
a new user of Erlang to know how to approach this list.
This is a break down of modules you will most likely make use of.
Data Structures
- lists
Manipulate Erlang lists, commonly used higher order functions
- proplists
Manipulate lists of “property” values
- dict
Key/value dictionary
- sets
Collection of unique elements
- queue
FIFO queues
- orddict
Ordered dictionaries
- ordsets
Ordered sets
- string
String manipulation
- unicode
Unicode manipulation
Data Storage and Retrieval
- ets
In memory Erlang term storage
- dets
On disk Erlang term storage
Files
- file
Higher level file operations
- filelib
Lower level file operations
- filename
File name manipulation
Date/Time
- calendar
Miscellaneous date and time functions
Networking
- inet
Various TCP/IP functions
- gen_tcp
Interface to TCP/IP sockets
- gen_udp
Interface to UDP sockets
- gen_sctp
Interface to SCTP sockets
General IO
- io
IO server functions
- io_lib
IO library functions
Regular Expressions
- re
Regular expression support
Erlang System
- erlang
Erlang BIFs (built in functions)
- sys
Interface to Erlang system messages
- init
Coodination of Erlang system startup
Operating System
- os
Operating system functions
File Archives and Compression
- zip
Read and create zip archives
- zlib
ZLIB compression support
Hash Digests and Cryptography
- base64
base64 encoding and decoding
- crypto
Cryptographic functions
General Computation
- math
Common mathematical functions
- random
Pseudo random number generation
Testing
- eunit
EUnit support
- ct
Common Test support
Debugging
- dbg
Text based tracing
- debugger
Graphical debugger
Developer Utilities
- edoc
Documentation generator
- cover
Coverage analysis
- cprof
Call count profiling tool
- fprof
Time profiling tool
- dialyzer
Discrepancy analysis tool
