Lua Strings

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qI6473
Published Aug 9, 2023
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Strings are a sequence of characters of any length that can include letters, numbers, symbols, and spaces.

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Syntax

In Lua, a string is a sequence of characters surrounded by a pair of single quotes '' or double quotes "".

location = "Central Park" -- "Central Park" is a string

Concatenation

Multiple strings can be combined together using the concatenation operator ...

time = 10
location = "Central Park"
print("We will arrive at " .. location .. " at ".. time)

Escape Characters

Escape characters are used for clarity and conciseness. Sometimes, Lua may interpret a character in a string, which can cause errors. To avoid this, escape characters can be used to clarify that a character should be read as a string.

brokenString = "They said, "Hello!"" -- This will cause "Hello!" to be outside of the string


revisedString = "They said, \"Hello!\"" -- This will keep "Hello!" inside of the string using escape characters

The following is a list of some useful escape characters supported by Lua strings:

Description Escape Characters
bell \a
backspace \b
form feed \f
new line \n
carriage return \r
horizontal tab \t
vertical tab \v
backslash \\
quotation mark [double quote] \"
apostrophe [single quote] \'

String Functions

Lua’s string library contains many different string functions that can be used to manipulate strings. These functions include the following:

Strings

.byte()
Returns the ASCII equivalent of a given character.
.char()
Converts a decimal value to its character representation.
.find()
Used to search for a substring (pattern) within a given string
.format()
Creates formatted strings.
.len()
Returns the length of a string, measured in bytes.
.lower()
Returns a copy of the string given, with all uppercase characters transformed to lowercase.
.reverse()
Returns a provided string in reverse order.
.sub()
Extracts a substring from a given string.
.upper()
Converts all letters in a string to uppercase.

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    Computer Science

    Looking for an introduction to the theory behind programming? Master Python while learning data structures, algorithms, and more!
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    Learn the basics of Lua, a general-purpose programming language used for building games, web apps, and developer tools.
    • Beginner Friendly.
      4 hours