Lua need to split at comma

lua split match
Jaron Bradley picture Jaron Bradley · Oct 9, 2013 · Viewed 57.7k times · Source

I've googled and I'm just not getting it. Seems like such a simple function, but of course Lua doesn't have it.

In Python I would do

string = "cat,dog"
one, two = string.split(",")

and then I would have two variables, one = cat. two = dog

How do I do this in Lua!?

Answer

marcus picture marcus · Oct 9, 2013

Try this

str = 'cat,dog'
for word in string.gmatch(str, '([^,]+)') do
    print(word)
end

'[^,]' means "everything but the comma, the + sign means "one or more characters". The parenthesis create a capture (not really needed in this case).

Related questions

Split string in Lua?

I need to do a simple split of a string, but there doesn't seem to be a function for this, and the manual way I tested didn't seem to work. How would I do it?

Read More
Lua string to int

How can I convert a string to an integer in Lua? I have a string like this: a = "10" I would like it to be converted to 10, the number.

Read More
How to get number of entries in a Lua table?

Sounds like a "let me google it for you" question, but somehow I can't find an answer. The Lua # operator only counts entries with integer keys, and so does table.getn: tbl = {} tbl["test"] = 47 tbl[1] = 48 print(#tbl, table.getn(tbl)) …

Read More