Elixir String Manipulation

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

iex(1)> String.codepoints("你好a")
["你", "好", "a"]

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

iex(2)> String.to_charlist("你好a")
[20320, 22909, 97]