Problems with: Most efficient way to recognize a line by its first three characters

[meino.cramer@...]

Hi,

I decided to start a new thread about this, since I think
I stumbled accross a problem, which not really has something
to do with the "Most efficient way..." as such.

I asked, whether it is ok to make the format of the data
public and it is ok -- it was already public (which I didnt know ;)

I am trying to check all the nice suggestion which were
given in the originating thread (THANK YOU!) and started 
with this code:


#! /usr/bin/lua

function scan ()
 local bad=function (prefix,info) print("Not recognized"..prefix) end
 local handlers={
  ["$1;"]=function( prefix, info ) print ( "$1;")  end,
  ["$2;"]=function( prefix, info ) print ( "$2;")  end,
  ["$3;"]=function( prefix, info ) print ( "$3;")  end,
  ["$4;"]=function( prefix, info ) print ( "$4;")  end,
  ["$5;"]=function( prefix, info ) print ( "$5;")  end,
  ["$6;"]=function( prefix, info ) print ( "$6;")  end,
  ["§7;"]=function( prefix, info ) print ( "§7;")  end,
  ["§8;"]=function( prefix, info ) print ( "§8;")  end,
  ["CFG"]=function( prefix, info ) print ( "CFG")  end,
  ["DAT"]=function( prefix, info ) print ( "DAT")  end,
  ["KEY"]=function( prefix, info ) print ( "KEY")  end,
  ["REF"]=function( prefix, info ) print ( "REF")  end,
  ["VER"]=function( prefix, info ) print ( "VER")  end
 }
 local f = assert(io.open("/tmp/example.txt","r") )
 local line

 while true do
   line = f:read("*line" )
   if not line then break end
 	local prefix, info = line:sub(1,3), line:sub(4)
 	local h = handlers[prefix] or bad
 	h(prefix,info)
 end
end

scan()


Everything works fine...except the recongition of the lines
beginning with '§'...
And I have not a single idea, why...

Thank you very mcuh in advance for any help!
Best regards,
mcc