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Programming in Lua - 4.3.5

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23 views

Programming in Lua - 4.3.5

lua.org

Uploaded by

Qin Krein
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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This first edition was written for Lua 5.0.

While still largely relevant for later versions, there are


some differences.
The fourth edition
targets Lua 5.3 and is available at Amazon and other bookstores.
By buying the book, you also help to support the Lua project.

Programming in Lua
Part I. The Language
Chapter 4. Statements

4.3.5 – Generic for

The generic for loop allows you to traverse all values


returned by an iterator
function.
We have already seen examples of the generic for:

-- print all values of array `a'

for i,v in ipairs(a) do print(v) end

For each step in that code, i gets an index,


while v gets the value associated
with that index.
A similar example shows how we traverse all keys of a table:

-- print all keys of table `t'

for k in pairs(t) do print(k) end

Despite its apparent simplicity,


the generic for is powerful.
With proper
iterators,
we can traverse almost anything,
and do it in a readable fashion.
The standard libraries provide several iterators,
which allow us to iterate over
the lines of a file
(io.lines),
the pairs in a table (pairs),
the words of a string
(string.gfind, which we will see in Chapter 20),
and so on.
Of course, we can
write our own iterators.
Although the use of the generic for is easy,
the task of
writing iterator functions has its subtleties.
We will cover this topic later, in
Chapter 7.

The generic loop shares two properties with the numeric loop:
The loop
variables are local to the loop body
and you should never assign any value to
the loop variables.

Let us see a more concrete example of the use


of a generic for.
Suppose you
have a table with the names of the days of the week:

days = {"Sunday", "Monday", "Tuesday", "Wednesday",

"Thursday", "Friday", "Saturday"}

Now you want to translate a name into its position in the week.
You can
search the table, looking for the given name.
Frequently, however,
a more
efficient approach in Lua is to build a reverse table,
say revDays,
that has the
names as indices and the numbers as values.
That table would look like this:
revDays = {["Sunday"] = 1, ["Monday"] = 2,

["Tuesday"] = 3, ["Wednesday"] = 4,

["Thursday"] = 5, ["Friday"] = 6,

["Saturday"] = 7}

Then, all you have to do to find the order of a name


is to index this reverse
table:

x = "Tuesday"

print(revDays[x]) --> 3

Of course, we do not need to manually declare the reverse table.


We can build
it automatically from the original one:

revDays = {}

for i,v in ipairs(days) do

revDays[v] = i

end

The loop will do the assignment for each element of days,


with the variable i
getting the index (1, 2, ...) and
v the value ("Sunday", "Monday", ...).

Copyright © 2003–2004 Roberto Ierusalimschy. All rights reserved.

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