IO.inspect Label

When doing puts-driven-development in Elixir, IO.inspect/1 and IO.inspect/2 are very useful. These functions return their items unchanged, allowing us to spy on a value in our Elixir code.

I'm a fan of the :label option, which decorates our output with a label, making it easier to understand.

def channel_name_split(channel) do
  channel.name
  |> IO.inspect(label: "channel name before")
  |> String.split("")
  |> IO.inspect(label: "channel name after")
end

And here's the output in our server log:

channel name before: "workflow"
channel name after: ["", "w", "o", "r", "k", "f", "l", "o", "w", ""]

Check out h IO.inspect in IEX for more info.