Re: String indexing again

[steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@...>]

On Mon, Dec 20, 2010 at 10:01 AM, Dirk Laurie <dpl@sun.ac.za> wrote:
> I suppose that is the portable way.  OK, I'll shut up on this topic
> now.

As a last gasp, it's not difficult to write a custom type that does
provide index access to string 'characters' (modulo UTF-8 etc [1])

http://gist.github.com/748160

You use it like this:

sa = StringAccessor 'hello'
for c in sa:iter() do  -- (see [2])
  print(c)
end

print(sa[1],sa[3])
print('end',sa[-1])

steve d.

[1] This kind of pattern would be useful for wrapping strings so that
one could properly extract non-ASCII characters....
[2] With Lua 5.2, ipairs can be overriden as well, making string
accessors more 'table-like'