I've found a lot of ways to split a string at a comma in Lua, but that's not quite what I'm looking for. I need to be able to do the following: I have the argument ABC being in as a string, and I need to be able to extract just the A, B, and the C. How do I do this? I keep hoping something like this will work:
x = tostring(ABC)
x[1]
x[2]
x[3]
You can also set a call metamethod for strings:
getmetatable("").__call = string.sub
Then this works:
for i=1,4 do
print(i,x(i),x(i,i))
end
Without confusing metatables:
function getCharacters(str)
local x = {}
for i=1, str:len(), 1 do
table.insert(x, str:sub(i, i))
end
return x
end
With this function, no matter how long your string is, you will always have a table filled with it's characters in it :)
If you just want to get the substrings of an index, this should work in most version of Lua:
x = 'ABC'
print (string.sub(x, 1, 1)) -- 'A'
print (string.sub(x, 2, 2)) -- 'B'
print (string.sub(x, 3, 3)) -- 'C'
In Lua 5.1 onward, according to this doc, you can do the following:
getmetatable('').__index = function(str,i) return string.sub(str,i,i) end
x = 'ABC'
print (x[1]) -- 'A'
print (x[2]) -- 'B'
print (x[3]) -- 'C'
__index metamethod for strings: function(str,i) return type(i)=="number" and str:sub(i,i) or str[i] endstr[i] should be replaced with string[i] to avoid stack overflow :-)It's quite easy. Just iterate.
(Assume you're using version 5.1 of Lua)
Code :
str = "xyz"
for i = 1, #str do
local c = str:sub(i,i)
print(c)
end
Output :
$lua main.lua
x
y
z
Or, as @tonypdmtr said in comment :
for s in s:gmatch '.' do print(s) end
for s in s:gmatch '.' do print(s) end