Re: Behavior of utf8.offset overflow

[Roberto Ierusalimschy <roberto@...>]

> (Side note: string.byte is a bit funny in that it returns _no value_
> in case of overflow (not nil)
> 
> > string.byte("hello", 10)
> > type(string.byte("hello", 10))
> stdin:1: bad argument #1 to 'type' (value expected)
> stack traceback:
>     [C]: in function 'type'
>     stdin:1: in main chunk
>     [C]: in ?
> > x = string.byte("hello", 10); print(x)
> nil
> 
> It's not clear to me what are the criteria for functions to return no
> value versus nil -- as seen above, string.find returns an explicit
> nil.)

string.byte has a variable number of returns:

> string.byte("hello", 3, 5)
  --> 108	108	111
> string.byte("hello", 5, 5)
  --> 111
> string.byte("hello", 6, 5)
  --> (nothing)

If there are no results to be returned, it returns nothing.

-- Roberto