differentiate a string from a list in Erlang

Question

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,

Answer 1

You have two functions in the module io_lib which can be helpful: io_lib:printable_list/1 and io_lib:printable_unicode_list/1 which test if the argument is a list of printable latin1 or unicode characters respectively.