proplists

proplists

Module

proplists

Module summary

Support functions for property lists.

Description

Property lists are ordinary lists containing entries in the form of either tuples, whose first elements are keys used for lookup and insertion, or atoms, which work as shorthand for tuples {Atom, true}. (Other terms are allowed in the lists, but are ignored by this module.) If there is more than one entry in a list for a certain key, the first occurrence normally overrides any later (irrespective of the arity of the tuples).

Property lists are useful for representing inherited properties, such as options passed to a function where a user can specify options overriding the default settings, object properties, annotations, and so on.

Two keys are considered equal if they match (=:=). That is, numbers are compared literally rather tha