Re: Saving a table in file

[Nevin Flanagan <Alestane@...>]

One way to serialize tables in Lua is to write the actual table constructor text into the file. This has the advantage that you can then use Lua itself to load the table from the file contents.

This is a simplified version that does not handle nested tables:

function table.pickle(t, fileName)

local output = io.open(fileName, "w")

output:write("return {\n")

for k, v in pairs(t) do

if (type(k) == 'string' or type(k) == 'number' or type(k) == 'boolean') 

and (type(v) == 'string' or type(v) == 'number' or type(v) == 'boolean'') then

if type(k) == 'string' then 

k = string.format("%q", k)

else

k = tostring(k)

end

if type(v) == 'string' then

v = string.format("%q", v)

else

v = tostring(v)

end

output:write(string.format("[%s] = %s,\n", k, v)

end

end

output:close()

end

NFF