Continuing through our list of less familiar features of Lisp, next is read-from-string.  The same caveats I mentioned under read apply here.  This is not something that you would typically use for a general-purpose input parser.  Like read, it requires that the input be fairly strongly constrained to match valid input that the Lisp REPL might encounter.  It is easy for it to encounter a character that will raise a condition, so tends to be used in places where the strings being interpreted are carefully generated in a *print-readably* format.