11. External Term Format

11 External Term Format

11.1 Introduction

The external term format is mainly used in the distribution mechanism of Erlang.

As Erlang has a fixed number of types, there is no need for a programmer to define a specification for the external format used within some application. All Erlang terms have an external representation and the interpretation of the different terms is application-specific.

In Erlang the BIF erlang:term_to_binary/1,2 is used to convert a term into the external format. To convert binary data encoding to a term, the BIF erlang:binary_to_term/1 is used.

The distribution does this implicitly when sending messages across node boundaries.

The overall format of the term format is as follows: