Exercise 1.2.7

Strings From Characters

Most of the time, you'll want to work with strings instead of characters. You can get a one-character string object directly from a character object by calling the string function on it:

(string #\greek_small_letter_lamda)

But the string function only takes one argument, a character or a string, and isn't very smart. It doesn't know how to do much in terms of type conversion.

It's also easy to get a string from a list of characters. Remember the coerce function introduced in exercise 1.2.4? You can change the type argument from 'list to 'string, and then the coerce function knows you want convert the list into a sequence of type string:

(coerce '(#\( #\greek_small_letter_lamda #\)) 'string)

What You Should See

* (string #\greek_small_letter_lamda)
"λ"
* (coerce '(#\( #\greek_small_letter_lamda #\)) 'string)
"(λ)"