Lua - Pattern matching

Exercises, examples and other material relating to training module U108. This topic is presented on public courses Learning to program in Lua, Lua Programming, Lua Programming

Articles and tips on this subject		updated
4366	Changing what operators do on objects - a comparison across different programming languages In Object Oriented languages, you used named pieces of code known as methods to perform an operation on a variable - for example you might write weeklist.extend(weekend) to take a list of (something) for a week and add a list relating to weekend onto the end of it. Sometimes, the method ...	2014-12-30 (longer)
3687	Binary / bitwise operations in Lua with the standard bit32 library If you want to do bit manipulation in Lua, you can use the bit32 library (which is loaded as a table) from Lua 5.2, and it's backported to newer Lua 5.1 versions as well. Bit manipulation is particularly useful in applications where data is packed into a series of bytes - in effect an array of booleans. Let's ...	2012-04-06
2383	Lua Regular Expressions OK - don't believe the headline - Lua doesn't support "Regular expressions" but it does have pattern matching. Why? Because Lua is designed to have a small footprint, and a conventional Regular Expression library would be 'bloat' - the pattern matching that's provided looks similar, and offers 80% ...	2010-06-19
2727	Making a Lua program run more than 10 times faster I made an extraordinary claim on Thursday. One of my delegates had written a program that analyzed a huge data file in a Lua script, and it was taking over half an hour to run. "Give me five minutes, and I could have that running in less that five minutes" I claimed. It was all to do with pattern ...	2010-05-14
2702	First and last match with Regular Expressions Conventional Wisdom says that it's pointless to start a regular expression with "." or ".+", as this is implied within a match - regular expression matches are looking for strings that are contained anyway: '/abc/' - contains abc '/.abc/' - contains anything or nothing, followed by abc However - ...	2010-04-02
1847	Lua - IAQ (Infrequently Answered Questions) 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 ...	2008-11-02
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

dls	Pattern substitute, pattern match and extract
iiapc	Pattern matching in Lua (not Regular Expressions)
lpm	Anchoring and delimiting patterns
patplode	iterating through a string, choosing a pattern
pcis	Pattern match and extract - a postcode
slander0	Pattern matching - SLOW code
slander1	Pattern matching - FAST code
split	split or explode in Lua
stratch	String Pattern Matching

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 [here].

Topics covered in this module

Anchors, literal characters, counts and groups.
Capturing matchs, capturing all the matches (global)
Pattern Based functions.

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