TIL: Emacs Lisp - write a string to a file

A short, sweet, very basic TIL today. You have a string. You want to write it to a file. You are using Emacs Lisp.

Use f. It’s a good library.

Then call f-write-text.

(setq my-string "Hello world.")
(f-write-text my-string 'utf-8 "file_path.txt")

You can substitute the 'utf8 symbol with other encodings if that’s your thing. The encoding is passed to encode-coding-string which is the subject of the previous TIL. M-x list-coding-systems will tell you which coding systems you have installed.

The stdlib way is to use with-temp-file combined with insert. This is nicer.

For most I/O operations, you want to start with the excellent f, just as most of the time, for string manipulation, you want to use s, and for sequences (or function combinators, or a bunch of other stuff), you want dash.

Awesome Elisp is a helpful list of other modern libraries for common programming tasks, as is this blog post.

This is a TIL post. What’s that?