Basic lua: Tables

From The Official Visionaire Studio: Adventure Game Engine Wiki
Revision as of 01:48, 5 November 2014 by AFRLme (talk)

Tables are one of the features of Lua script, that make the scripting language so dynamic & easy to use, as they allow us to easily create tables, insert, remove & sort data. Tables are often comprised of arrays that usually involve keywords - or an index number - & a value. Tables can be accessed using multiple different methods.

< Index >

Creating a table

method 1: automatically generated index values
local t = {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, "six", 7, "ate", 9} -- automatically assigns an index number to each value starting from 1.

print( "index total = " .. #(t) ) -- print total of table entries

for i = 1, table.maxn(t) do -- for 1 to table total, print value of index number
 print( t[i] )
end
click to enlarge
method 2: manually created index values
local t = {} -- empty table
t[1] = 1
t[2] = "two"
t[3] = 3
t[4] = 2 * 2
t[5] = "five"

print( "index total = " .. #(t) ) -- print total of table entries

for i = 1, table.maxn(t) do -- for 1 to table total, print value of index number
 print( t[i] )
end
click to enlarge