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Arturo Amaldi wrote:
> I am a relative newbie with regards to Lua. I am missing dearly the
> presence of a scanf() facility -- I often have to deal with tables of
> numbers written in exponential or floating point notation, and the use
> of sscanf on a line iteration made it much easier to read in data. I
> know i could use the "*number" format but I'd rather read the file
> line by line and separate it afterwards.

As a Lua user, I'm glad I never have to touch scanf ever again.
:-) Read and validate is always safer, I think.

Try using line iteration like the ref manual says:

    for line in io.lines(filename) do <body> end
    for line in file:lines() do <body> end

Or something similar. Then use regular expressions to parse the
line, perhaps using string.gmatch or something like that. A simple
regex would be "[^,]+".

> I am grateful for any pointers you could give me.

-- 
Cheers,
Kein-Hong Man (esq.)
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia