A regular expression is a special text string that is used to describe a search pattern.PCRE (Perl Compatible Regular Expressions) is a C library implementing regex. It was written in 1997 when Perl was the de-facto choice for complex text processing tasks. The syntax for patterns used in PCRE closely ... Read More

When working with JSON we generally need to decode JSON into a string or maybe encode a string into JSON. Both of these processes of converting the string into a JSON or the opposite are seen frequently.While Lua doesn’t provide an official library to do the same, we can still ... Read More

We know that Lua does a great job when it comes to being a simple language and an embedded language. Lua works even better with C, because of the different libraries that provide a great amount of support for it.In order to compile embedded Lua in C, we need to ... Read More

While there are different ways with which a person can compile a Lua executable, some of them require more time and resources.The most basic approach is to set the Lua Path environment variable and then simply run the lua command. While this might seem to be not much of a ... Read More

Calling a Lua function from C is something that requires a series of steps and a mastery in the Lua library functions. Lua provides several library functions that we can use whenever we want to call Lua functions from C or the opposite.Some of the most commonly used Lua library ... Read More

Lua provides automatic garbage collection that is very helpful in providing safe memory management. It basically means that you do not need to worry about the newly created object or how to allocate memory.Lua is running a garbage collector to collect all dead objects (that is, objects that can not ... Read More

Copying a table means that we want all the values or pairs that are present in one table in another table. In Lua, there’s no standard library function that we can use to create such a table but we can create our own function to do so.Let’s create a function ... Read More

We know that there’s a huge gap in the popularity and use-cases of JavaScript and Lua. Besides this gap in popularity and use-cases, these languages have many differences at code level.The following table highlights some of the most notable differences between JavaScript and Lua.KeyJavaScriptLuaImplicit conversion when comparingJavaScript does implicit conversion ... Read More

The .(dot) operator in Lua is used to invoke the method of an object, and it is a widely used operator in Lua.The :(colon) operator in Lua is used when you want to pass an invisible parameter to the method of an object that you are calling.Let’s consider an example ... Read More

We can append two tables together in Lua with a trivial function, but it should be noted that no library function exists for the same.There are different approaches to concatenating two tables in Lua. I’ve written two approaches that perform more or less the same when it comes to complexity.The ... Read More