Elixir String Manipulation

To get the list of string that compose a longer string, use String.codepoints/1

iex> cdp =  String.codepoints("abcdefg")
["a", "b", "c", "d", "e", "f", "g"]
iex> Enum.at(cdp, 0)
"a"

To get the list of codepoints that represent each letter in the string, use String.to_charlist/1

iex> chr = String.to_charlist("abcdefg")
'abcdefg'
iex> Enum.at(chr, 0)
97