Re: #table oddity?

[Jimmie Houchin <jhouchin@...>]

Javier Guerra wrote:
> On Tuesday 23 January 2007 6:57 pm, Jimmie Houchin wrote:
> > So I don't understand why I am getting a size of 0 for a table of 10 items?
>
> the '#' operator works only for 'arrays' that is, tables indexed by numbers 
> from 1 to n, without holes.
>
> there's not a general 'table size' operator in Lua
>
> > Also I have lots of tables indexed by strings of digits as above.
> > But if I try to access them via
> >
> >  > =items.0007126409
> >
> > stdin:1: '<eof>' expected near '.0007126409'
> >
> > doesn't work, but this does.
> >
> >  > return items['0007126409']
> >
> > table: 0x8089bf0
>
> from the manual:
>
> "The syntax var.Name is just syntactic sugar for var["Name"]"
> note that 'Name' isn't any kind of string; also from the manual:
> "Names (also called identifiers) in Lua can be any string of letters, digits, 
> and underscores, not beginning with a digit. This coincides with the 
> definition of names in most languages."
>
> so, your table's keys are not 'Names', since they begin with a digit

Thanks for the reply and the lesson.

You are so very right. I wasn't thinking clearly. I wouldn't do it in 
the interpreter.

I was writing a program to parse some data which was indexed by strings 
of digits and it just seemed natural to index the table with those 
identifiers. It never occurred to me that a string of digits wasn't a 
valid identifier or name.

I am kind of surprised I didn't get an error on the assignment of such 
indexes. I've got lots of them.

Thanks again for the lesson. I've got some errors to fix. :)

Jimmie