Printing of for loop's value outputs nil in Lua

Question

Take a look at the for loop and the word part of it specifically.

local words = { 
    "One - Test", 
    "Two - Test", 
    "Three - Test"
}

local find = "Test"

local function getWord(partialName)
    partialName = partialName:lower()
    for _,word in ipairs(words) do

        if string.find(word:lower(),partialName) then
            print(word)
        end
    end
end

getWord(find)

Output:

One - Test
Two - Test
Three - Test

I'm trying to store everything that gets outputted to other variables. print(word) outputs what you see above, but how can I only get the One - Test result of it and store it to another variable? I've tried using print(word[1]) to test it out, but it didn't work and outputted nil.

nil (x3)  -  Client - Local Script:14

Now how can I fix that? Very much appreciated!

Do you want to get only One, or One - Test? If One, you need to split the string and return the first part, if One - Test, you can get it by words[1]. — pavelsaman
– pavelsaman, Commented Oct 4, 2021 at 12:28
@pavelsaman Let's say that I have a huge table and used this script to locate "One - Test" using the "find" variable, I would like to store the outputs in order to other variables and "word[1]" doesn't help unfortunately. Also words[1] is only for when I know where "One - Test" is, but let's say that I didn't. — user15915698
– user15915698, Commented Oct 4, 2021 at 12:32
You can create a lookup table like so huge_table = { ["One - Test"]=true, ["Two - Test"]=true }, then searching for some key would be just huge_table["One - Test"]. — pavelsaman
– pavelsaman, Commented Oct 4, 2021 at 12:41
One - Test is not a word. You should use more suitable names. Same for getWord. A function named getWord should return a single word. — Piglet
– Piglet, Commented Oct 4, 2021 at 12:47

Piglet · Accepted Answer · 2021-10-04 12:43:04Z

1

Instead of printing your result you can simply put every result in a table.

local words = { 
    "One - Test", 
    "Two - Test", 
    "Three - Test"
}
   
local find = "Test"

local function getWord(partialName)
    partialName = partialName:lower()
    local output = {}
    for _,word in ipairs(words) do 
        if string.find(word:lower(),partialName) then
            table.insert(output, word)
        end
    end
    return output
end

print(table.concat(getWord(find), "\n"))

answered Oct 4, 2021 at 12:43

Piglet

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1 Comment

user15915698 Over a year ago

Thank you very much and yes, I will choose more suitable names later on, this was just for testing!

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