Here are a handful of "one line" answers from the end of the Lua Course I was running at the end of last week

• Command line parameters in Lua are available to the program in an indexed table called arg. (Sample Program)

• Functions in Lua can look at the number and type of parameters they're called with, and can behave differently depending on what they find (Sample program showing a function that can be called with two numbers OR one table as parameters)

• Although Pattern Matching does NOT use regular expressions in Lua, it does use many of the same principles - anchors, literal characters, groups and counts. And it can provide much of the same power but in a far smaller package! (Sample program showing how a postcode is matched and vital sections extracted)

• You can find out what is in a module by looping through its table keys - because (I'm sure you've not forgotten!) everything is a table in Lua (Sample program that lists out everything in the OS module)

You'll find many more sample programs, tips and techniques in our Lua Index. If you start with our Introduction to Lua module page, you'll find some basics. And then down the right hand side of that page, you'll find links to other groups of Lua resources such as Pattern Matching and Combining Lua and C in the same program.
(written 2008-10-18, updated 2008-11-02)

 U118 - Lua - Resources.
  [1111] Training in Lua - (2007-03-16)
  [1695] Lua Course - here is the index - (2008-07-03)
  [2319] Graphics in Lua - an example using the gd library - (2009-08-02)

U112 - Lua - Other Standard Library features.
  [2951] Lots of way of converting 3 letter month abbreviations to numbers - (2010-09-10)

U108 - Lua - Pattern matching
  [1744] Lua examples, Lua Courses - (2008-08-08)
  [2383] Lua Regular Expressions - (2009-08-28)
  [2702] First and last match with Regular Expressions - (2010-04-02)
  [2727] Making a Lua program run more than 10 times faster - (2010-04-16)
  [3687] Binary / bitwise operations in Lua with the standard bit32 library - (2012-04-06)
  [4366] Changing what operators do on objects - a comparison across different programming languages - (2014-12-26)

U106 - Lua - Functions.
  [1685] Short circuit evaluation (lazy operator) in Lua - (2008-06-22)
  [1697] Sorting in lua - specifying your own sort routine - (2008-07-05)
  [1699] If you are learning Lua, here are some more examples - (2008-07-06)
  [1743] First class functions in Lua lead to powerful OO facilities - (2008-08-07)
  [2312] What are closures in Lua? - (2009-07-31)
  [2347] Dot, dot, dot in Lua - variable length parameter lists - (2009-08-11)
  [2356] Passing multiple results back from a function - Lua, Python, etc - (2009-08-13)
  [2455] Lua examples - coroutines, error handling, objects, etc - (2009-10-15)
  [2723] Returning multiple values from a function - Lua - (2010-04-15)
  [2949] Lua - variable function arguments and select - (2010-09-08)
  [3695] Functions are first class variables in Lua and Python - (2012-04-13)

Back to Old Piles of the South West

Previous and next or Horse's mouth home

Forward to 30th November - Santa Trip from Melksham

Pictures from a delegate
Daisy the Cow and a Pint of Ginger Beer
String matching in Perl with Regular Expressions
30th November - Santa Trip from Melksham
Lua - IAQ (Infrequently Answered Questions)
Old Piles of the South West
Passing a table from Lua into C
Calling functions in C from your Lua script - a first HowTo
How many cups of coffee?
Lua Course, and the Wiltshire Countryside too