In Erlang when you have a list of printable characters, its a string, but a string is also a list of items and all functions of a list can be applied onto a string. Really, the data structure string doesn't exist in Erlang.
Part of my code needs to be sure that something is not only a list, but it's a string. (A real string). It needs to separate lists e.g. [1,2,3,a,b,"josh"] , from string e.g. "Muzaaya" .
The guard expression is_list/1 will say true for both strings and lists. There is no such guard as is_string/1 and so this means I need a code snippet will make sure that my data is a string.
A string in this case is a list of only printable (alphabetical, both cases, upper and lower), and may contain numbers e.g "Muzaaya2536 618 Joshua" . I need a code snippet please (Erlang) that will check this for me and ensure that the variable is a string, not just a list. thanks