Re: whats the easy way to dump a table as a string?

[Matt Campbell <mattc@...>]

Hello Sam:

The book _Programming in Lua_ covers serialization of tables, both with 
and without support for cycles.  For your convenience, here's my 
serialize function, which is based on the book's example without cycle 
support but returns a string instead of writing to the current output 
file.  I hope this helps.

function serialize(o)
 local t = type(o)
 if t == "number" then
   return tostring(o)
 elseif t == "string" then
   return string.format("%q", o)
 elseif t == "table" then
   local result = "{"
   local nextIndex = 1
   local first = true
   for k, v in pairs(o) do
     if first then
       first = false
     else
       result = result .. ", "
     end
     if type(k) == "number" and k == nextIndex then
       nextIndex = nextIndex + 1
     else
       if type(k) == "string" and string.find(k, "^[_%a][_%w]*$") then
         result = result .. k
       else
         result = result .. "[" .. serialize(k) .. "]"
       end
       result = result .. " = "
     end
     result = result .. serialize(v)
   end
   result = result .. "}"
   return result
 else
   return tostring(o)
 end
end

--
Matt Campbell
Lead Programmer
Serotek Corporation
www.freedombox.info
"The Accessibility Anywhere People"