Re: lua scripts as string within another script

[Paul K <paul@...>]

Hi Milind,

>         I have a lua script which has some scripts written inside string
> variables. Is it possible to have these scripts as compiled scripts so when
> I compile the main script using luac these scripts are not visible directly
> as text in the compiled file?

Just to make sure I understand what you are trying to do. You have a
script A, which you a compiling to bytecode, but you also have scripts
B and C embedded into A and you don't want the users to see B and C in
the compiled code?

If so, you can write a function that turns them into something else,
for example, set of numbers. This may look like this:

decode("my string I don't want to see")

and decode function checks if it gets a string, it simply returns it,
but if it gets an array, it converts the content of that array into a
string and returns it.

Then you write a pre-processor that finds all instances of
decode('some string') and convert them into something like
decode({f('s'), f('o'), f('m')....}), where f() is some function that
converts a character into a different form, for example, a number.

This is simple enough to not have a significant performance impact and
good enough to make messages not visible in the binary code. Usual
disclaimers about dedicated hackers apply...

Note that the bytecode Lua generates is platform-dependent (this is
not the case for LuaJIT, which generates version-dependent, but
platform independent bytecode).

Paul.