Recently I needed to convert keywords into symbols in Emacs Lisp and I noticed there was no built-in function for this, so I’ve decided to build one myself. Here’s my approach:

(defun keyword-to-symbol (keyword)
  "Convert KEYWORD to symbol."
  (intern (substring (symbol-name keyword) 1)))

(keyword-to-symbol :foo) ; => 'foo

It’s extremely simple really - using the fact that keywords in Emacs Lisp are actually symbols we can convert them to a string with symbol-name, drop their leading : and then convert them back to symbols.

For me the most interesting thing here was learning that keywords are symbols:

(symbolp :foo) ; => t

This was certainly a surprise the first time I saw it, although it does make sense. That prompted me to check how are keywords differentiated from symbols and I found the answer in the documentation of keywordp:

keywordp is a built-in function in ‘C source code’.

(keywordp OBJECT)

Return t if OBJECT is a keyword.
This means that it is a symbol with a print name beginning with ‘:’
interned in the initial obarray.

While I doubt that you’ll often (ever?) have to deal with keyword to symbol conversion I hope you’ve learned something fun and useful today! Keep hacking!