RE: Removing while iterating through table

["Virgil Smith" <Virgil@...>]

Ando, note that the original poster used "pairs" and not "ipairs".

Working backward is simple if you are counting down through the "array"
section of a table, but there is no way to "iterate backward" through a Lua
table in general (AFAIK).

----------
If iteration order is unimportant, I iterate from the last to the
first.  That way if the one I'm working with gets removed, it doesn't
affect the next ones (previous ones) at all...

ando

-----------------------
Ando Sonenblick
SpriTec Software
www.spritec.com
On Jul 22, 2004, at 5:33 PM, Jack Christensen wrote:

> What is the prefered way to iterate through a table while checking for
> some condition and selectively removing fields? I seem to recall that
> directly setting them to nil caused the next() function to get
> confused.
>
> This is what I'm doing now. It works but it seems there should be a
> better way.
>
>    local removeList = {} -- list to hold values to remove since we
> can't remove in the loop without messing it up
>    for k, v in pairs( self.eventList ) do
>        if v.time <= self.time then
>            v.event( self )
>            removeList[ k ] = k
>        end
>    end
>      for k, v in pairs( removeList ) do
>        self.eventList[ k ] = nil      end
>
> Jack
>