Operators reference

This document is a complete reference of operators in Elixir, how they are parsed, how they can be defined, and how they can be overridden.

General operators

Elixir provides the following built-in operators:

• + and - - unary positive/negative
• +, -, *, and / - basic arithmetic operations
• ++ and -- - list concatenation and subtraction
• and and && - strict and relaxed boolean "and"
• or and || - strict and relaxed boolean "or"
• not and ! - strict and relaxed boolean "not"
• in and not in - membership
• @ - module attribute
• .., .., and ..// - range creation
• <> - binary concatenation
• |> - pipeline
• =~ - text-based match

Many of those can be used in guards. Consult the list of allowed guard functions and operators.

Additionally, there are a few other operators that Elixir parses but doesn't actually use. See Custom and overridden operators below for a list and for guidelines about their use.

Some other operators are special forms and cannot be overridden:

• ^ - pin operator
• . - dot operator
• = - match operator
• & - capture operator
• :: - type operator

Finally, these operators appear in the precedence table below but are only meaningful within certain constructs:

• => - see %{}
• when - see Guards
• <- - see for and with
• \\ - see Default arguments

Comparison operators

Elixir provides the following built-in comparison operators (all of which can be used in guards):

• == - equal to
• === - strictly equal to
• != - not equal to
• !== - strictly not equal to
• < - less-than
• > - greater-than
• <= - less-than or equal to
• >= - greater-than or equal to

The only difference between == and === is that === is strict when it comes to comparing integers and floats:

iex> 1 == 1.0
true
iex> 1 === 1.0
false

!= and !== act as the negation of == and ===, respectively.

Operator precedence and associativity

The following is a list of all operators that Elixir is capable of parsing, ordered from higher to lower precedence, alongside their associativity:

Elixir also has two ternary operators:

Custom and overridden operators

Elixir is capable of parsing a predefined set of operators. It's not possible to define new operators (as supported by some languages). However, not all operators that Elixir can parse are used by Elixir: for example, + and || are used by Elixir for addition and boolean or, but <~> is not used (but valid).

To define an operator, you can use the usual def* constructs (def, defp, defmacro, and so on) but with a syntax similar to how the operator is used:

defmodule MyOperators do
  # We define ~> to return the maximum of the given two numbers,
  # and <~ to return the minimum.

  def a ~> b, do: max(a, b)
  def a <~ b, do: min(a, b)
end

To use the newly defined operators, you have to import the module that defines them:

iex> import MyOperators
iex> 1 ~> 2
2
iex> 1 <~ 2
1

The following is a table of all the operators that Elixir is capable of parsing, but that are not used by default:

• |||
• &&&
• <<<
• >>>
• <<~
• ~>>
• <~
• ~>
• <~>
• +++
• ---
• ...

The following operators are used by the Bitwise module when imported: &&&, <<<, >>>, and |||. See the Bitwise documentation for more information.

Note that the Elixir community generally discourages custom operators. They can be hard to read and even more to understand, as they don't have a descriptive name like functions do. That said, some specific cases or custom domain specific languages (DSLs) may justify these practices.

It is also possible to replace predefined operators, such as +, but doing so is extremely discouraged.