Common Lisp Programmatic Keyword

Question

Is there a function in Common Lisp that takes a string as an argument and returns a keyword?

Example: (keyword "foo") -> :foo

Answer 1

The answers given while being roughly correct do not produce a correct solution to the question's example.

Consider:

CL-USER(4): (intern "foo" :keyword)  :|foo| NIL CL-USER(5): (eq * :foo)  NIL 

Usually you want to apply STRING-UPCASE to the string before interning it, thus:

(defun make-keyword (name) (values (intern (string-upcase name) "KEYWORD"))) 

Answer 2

Here's a make-keyword function which packages up keyword creation process (interning of a name into the KEYWORD package). :-)

(defun make-keyword (name) (values (intern name "KEYWORD")))

Answer 3

There is a make-keyword function in the Alexandria library, although it does preserve case so to get exactly what you want you'll have to upcase the string first.