Certain unicode in binary strings fails

[Raynes]

iex> "&<>\" ゆんゆん"
** (::ArgumentError) argument error
    erlang:list_to_binary([38,60,62,34,32,12422,12435,12422,12435])
    src/elixir_parser.yrl:449: elixir_parser:build_bin_string/1
    src/elixir_parser.yrl:163: elixir_parser:"yeccpars2_38"/7
    /usr/local/Cellar/erlang/R15B/lib/erlang/lib/parsetools-2.0.7/include/yeccpre.hrl:56: elixir_parser:"yeccpars0"/5
    src/elixir_translator.erl:12: elixir_translator:forms/3
    src/elixir.erl:48: elixir:eval/5
    lib/elixir/iex.ex:21: ::Elixir::IEx.do_loop/2

however lists seem to work... kinda

iex> '&<>" ゆんゆん'
[38,60,62,34,32,12422,12435,12422,12435]

Also, you can do this:

iex> Erlang.unicode.characters_to_binary '&<>" ゆんゆん'
<<38,60,62,34,32,227,130,134,227,130,147,227,130,134,227,130,147>>

I don't know enough about unicode/encodings to know if this behavior is expected or not. I really don't even know what is going on. Seems like a bug though.

[josevalim]

It seems the error exists only on IEx. I have partially fixed it to not fail, although the representation is not what I expect as result:

iex> " ゆんゆん"
<<32,227,130,134,227,130,147,227,130,134,227,130,147>>

We need to be able to identify if some utf-8 codepoint is printable or not. But this is a longer more complicated history I will tackle hopefully in the future. Thanks for the report.