Strings

In Lua you define a string like that:

name = "Alice"

Quotes

You can use both single quotation marks and double quotation marks to define a string:

tutorial = 'Usually you start a tutorial with "Hello, World!" example'
lesson = "In this lesson we're going to learn Lua syntax"

There is also special syntax for defining a multiline string:

description =
[[Welcome to Lua tutorials!
Now you know how to write "Hello, World!".
Today we will learn how to deal with Lua strings!]]

Operators

To concatenate two strings use .. operator:

print("Hello, " .. "World!")

Using this operator with numbers converts them into a string:

value = 1 .. 2
print(value .. ", " .. type(value))

This will output:

12, string

To get string length use # operator:

name = "Alice"

print(#name)

Simple conversion

There are two simple conversion functions provided: tonumber and tostring:

a = "50"
b = 10
c = "Alice"
d = function () end

print(tonumber(a), type(tonumber(a))); -- 50    number

print(tostring(b), type(tostring(b))); -- 10    string

print(tonumber(c), type(tonumber(c))); -- nil   nil

print(tostring(d), type(tostring(d))); -- function: 0x1e79700   string

Escape sequences

The following escape sequences are available in Lua:

sequences =
{
    "\a", -- Bell
    "\b", -- Back space
    "\f", -- Form feed
    "\n", -- New line
    "\r", -- Carriage return
    "\t", -- Horizontal tab
    "\v", -- Vertical tab
    "\\", -- Backslash
    "\"", -- Double quotes
    "\'", -- Single quotes
    "\[", -- Left square bracket
    "\]"  -- Right square bracket
}