Re: (newbie) Lua equivalent of split() in perl?

[Shmuel Zeigerman <shmuz@...>]

Gregory Benjamin wrote:
> How does one do the equivalent of
> the following Perl code:
>
> ($name,$birthyear,$sex) = split();
>
> when presented with a line of input text like:
>
> "jane 2000 f"
>
> which results in $name = "jane", $birthyear = 2000, $sex = "f"
>
> in Lua 5.0?

There is no built-in split in Lua 5.0.
But it's easy to define one:

function split(text, start)
  local s,e,word = string.find(text, "(%S+)", start or 1)
  if s then return word, split(text, e+1); end
end

name, birthyear, sex = split(input_text)

--
Shmuel