Re: moving a lua array to C

["Wim Couwenberg" <w.couwenberg@...>]

> One
> way would be to count the elements first then copy them but then I'd
> be doing two times the needed work. Is there a better(faster/cleaner)
> way to do this?

Getting the number of entries _is_ cheap:

Lua 4: lua_getn(L, index);  /* index of table in stack */

In Lua 5 getn is no longer in the C API but it is available as table.getn in
the base lib: (sample code w/o checking of any kind :-)

/* get "table" table */
lua_pushstring(L, "table");
lua_gettable(L, LUA_GLOBALSINDEX);

/* get "getn" entry */
lua_pushstring(L, "getn");
lua_gettable(L, -2);

/* call it and get result */
lua_pushvalue(L, index);  /* index of your table in the stack */
lua_call(L, 1, 1);
n_elements = lua_tonumber(L, -1);  /* store table size */
lua_pop(L, 1);  /* pop table size */

Of course you can also keep a private reference to the getn function instead
of constantly looking it up in the globals (e.g. in the lua registry.)

Yet another possibility is to start with a small C array and doubling its
size whenever it would overflow.  Adding values to your array this way is
still a (amortized) constant time operation, i.e. cheap.

Bye,
Wim