Lua way to do this code

[Mariusz Gliwiński <alienballance@...>]

Hello,
I'm quite new to lua, but i like simplicity of the language (syntax is 
too verbose for me, but everything else is great).
Firstly, i hope that this is proper place for my small question which 
isn't too important, but I'm just curious what response i will receive.

I've been writing the code, and i got the strange feeling that this 
snippet isn't written in the way that i should code in lua - or at least 
functional way.

So i kindly ask: how would you do this iteration?

    local ret = {}
    for p in string.explode(str, ";") do
        local k,v = string.gmatch(p, "([xyz])=(%d+)")()
        ret[k] = tonumber(v)
    end

Thanks,
Mariusz Gliwiński