Strings
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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
}
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Learning plan
6. Control flow
A list of Lua statements which you use to organize control flow of a program
7. Functions
What kind of functions are there and how to write them
How to write tail recursion in Lua properly
9. Strings
How to define and work with strings
10. Arrays
How to deal with arrays or lists
11. Tables
Table is a general Lua data structure, it's all about tables