RE: t._NAME etc.

["Jerome Vuarand" <jerome.vuarand@...>]

Thomas Lauer wrote:
> It seems what I need is a general way to get the printable name of a
> table (assuming that a module resides, one way or another, in a
> table).  
> 
> A quick look at the debug library has not shown me an easy way to do
> that so I'll have to try something homegrown. Or has someone an idea
> as to how to do this?  

In Lua values are anonymous. Sometimes there are way to get a usable
name for a value (like function names for stack tracebacks), but it not
always possible.

However if you have a table and you know it's a module loaded with
require, you can get its name from package.loaded. Here is an example to
do so:

function getmodulename(module)
    for k,v in pairs(package.loaded) do
       if v==module then return k end
    end
    return nil, "no module found"
end

local foo = require 'some.module'

local fooname = assert(getmodulename(foo))
print(fooname)
> some.module