Lua - Strings and the String library.

Lua module U104

Strings and the String library.

Exercises, examples and other material relating to training module U104. This topic is presented on public courses Learning to program in Lua, Lua Programming

Articles and tips on this subject		updated
2500	Dynamically formatting your results (Lua) Scenario: You're producing a short (text) table of results and you want to keep it reasonably small - not a great deal of white space, but the data in some of your columns differs dramatically from one set of results to another. How can you do it? Discussion: You can use your traditional "printf" ...	2009-11-11
2357	Checking if the user has entered a number (Lua) In Lua, there's a difference between 0 and nil - and that means that you can easily code to ask your user to enter a number, testing the result and allowing him to enter zero as a legitimate value. That may sound like it's no big deal, but you don't want a loop to exit on a premature 0. Here's code ...	2009-08-14
2348	Finding literals rather than patterns in Lua Lua's string.find looks for a PATTERN ... it's not as big an sophisticated as a regular expression match (but then it's got nothing like as big a footprint!), but neither is it a literal match. So if I want to search a string for - literally - a ".", I need to protect it. I can do this either with ...	2009-08-11
1744	Lua examples, Lua Courses Programming training is much more effective if the delegates are shown how a particular program is written, rather than just the final result ... show them just the final result and they'll ask "but how did you come up with that?" So whenever possible, I write new examples in front of my delegates - ...	2008-08-09

Examples from our training material

ee	Excercise to print out exchange rate table
gimme	Reading from the keyboard and string basics
kiddos	Spread money gift around a group of children
kids	String formatting
mlx	Single and multiline strings
moopark	Answer to excercise - Theme park takings
qbs	backslash specials in character strings and other basics
s2	Finding literal strings
splitter	Using string.find and string.sub to split
stem	Basic String functionality
three	Wait until a NUMBER has been entered
two	Checking a NUMBER has been entered
ul	Use of string.rep

Background information

Some modules are available for download as a sample of our material or under an Open Training Notes License for free download from http://www.training-notes.co.uk.

Topics covered in this module

Double and single quotes, square brackets and backslashes.
String concat, length, etc
Formatting numbers in to strings.
String Conversion Functions.

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