[LUA 5.1] table

Lua's Tables are associative arrays. The element table contains all original lua table functions.

Tables are always passed by reference. If you really want to copy a table, you need to copy all its content.

To initialize a table in lua one uses {}.

mytable={}
print(mytable) -- table: 0032F3B8, the address of the table

As its an associative array (also known as map), you can set values in this table.

mytable={}
mytable["name"]="My Table"
print(mytable["name"]) -- My Table

Because of syntatic sugar you can also access the value of the "name"-field by the following construct.

print(mytable.name) -- My Table

In that way you can access and address values in a table.

To view all keys and its values in a table, you can use the following code snippet.

for key,value in pairs(mytable) do
	print(key..": "..tostring(value))
end

If you don't want to set the key and just want to append the value to the table, you can use table.insert.

mytable={}
table.insert(mytable,"This")
table.insert(mytable,"is")
table.insert(mytable,"content")
for key,value in pairs(mytable) do
	print(key..": "..tostring(value))
end
--[[
1: This
2: is
3: content
]]


To connect all items in a table to one string there is table.concat.
Code
mytable={}
table.insert(mytable,"This")
table.insert(mytable,"is")
table.insert(mytable,"content")
print(table.concat(mytable,'-')) -- This-is-content