You can expose arbitrary data to Lua via userdata. If you give your userdata values a metatable, you can define the behavior for various operators/operations on those userdata. In this case, we want to expose an array to Lua and define what to do in the case of array[index] and array[index] = value.
We expose the array to Lua by creating a userdata buffer large enough to hold the address of the array. We define the indexing/assignment behavior by created a metatable with the __index and __newindex methods.
Below is a complete, working example that exposes a static array to Lua. Your program will probably have some other call for returning the array to Lua. Note, there's no boundschecking at all; if you try to index outside the array bounds, you'll crash. To make this more robust, you'd want to change the userdata to a structure which has the array pointer and the array size, so you can do boundschecking.
#include "lauxlib.h"
// metatable method for handling "array[index]"
static int array_index (lua_State* L) {
int** parray = luaL_checkudata(L, 1, "array");
int index = luaL_checkint(L, 2);
lua_pushnumber(L, (*parray)[index-1]);
return 1;
}
// metatable method for handle "array[index] = value"
static int array_newindex (lua_State* L) {
int** parray = luaL_checkudata(L, 1, "array");
int index = luaL_checkint(L, 2);
int value = luaL_checkint(L, 3);
(*parray)[index-1] = value;
return 0;
}
// create a metatable for our array type
static void create_array_type(lua_State* L) {
static const struct luaL_reg array[] = {
{ "__index", array_index },
{ "__newindex", array_newindex },
NULL, NULL
};
luaL_newmetatable(L, "array");
luaL_openlib(L, NULL, array, 0);
}
// expose an array to lua, by storing it in a userdata with the array metatable
static int expose_array(lua_State* L, int array[]) {
int** parray = lua_newuserdata(L, sizeof(int**));
*parray = array;
luaL_getmetatable(L, "array");
lua_setmetatable(L, -2);
return 1;
}
// test data
int mydata[] = { 1, 2, 3, 4 };
// test routine which exposes our test array to Lua
static int getarray (lua_State* L) {
return expose_array( L, mydata );
}
int __declspec(dllexport) __cdecl luaopen_array (lua_State* L) {
create_array_type(L);
// make our test routine available to Lua
lua_register(L, "array", getarray);
return 0;
}
Usage:
require 'array'
foo = array()
print(foo) -- userdata
-- initial values set in C
print(foo[1])
print(foo[2])
print(foo[3])
print(foo[4])
-- change some values
foo[1] = 2112
foo[2] = 5150
foo[4] = 777
-- see changes
print(foo[1])
print(foo[2])
print(foo[3])
print(foo[4])
