help with table.insert

Posted by AquaBrother on Mon 22 Nov 2010 05:05 PM — 7 posts, 24,877 views.

AquaBrother Brazil Mon 22 Nov 2010 05:05 PM #0

Hi, i'm trying to do something i should not, hehe, once i have not enough experience on doing it...

Well, i'm trying to make a search in an especific table but i cannot find the right command to use...

I have a table called {friends}

I use the table.insert to insert new friends name in that table, i've read about a few functions on the internet that would find that name but, what i really need is making it search all name that fits with a sentence, eg:

if i type for example:

friend mike

and lez imagine that i have two friends named mike and mikein, i'd like that search to inform me that there are two names within the setence i just type...

Is that possible?

big trouble huh? if you feel like too busy or like it's too much trouble for answering that, nevermind...

Thx in advance

Fiendish USA Global Moderator Mon 22 Nov 2010 05:28 PM #1

I don't exactly understand. Is "friend mike" the sentence?
Can you give a better example of what you want to type and what you want to get as a result?

AquaBrother Brazil Mon 22 Nov 2010 05:42 PM #2

hehe, ok, i'll try to explain again...

I have the following table already made:

Mike
Mikein
Milan
Mordon
ETC...

I wanna type:

Friend mike

I wanna get as result:

There are two mike in your table:
Mike
Mikein

Fiendish USA Global Moderator Mon 22 Nov 2010 05:55 PM #3

Off the top of my head, assuming you have along the lines of

friends = {"Mike", "Mikein", "Mikeout", "Wanda", "Jeff"}

I think you could make an alias with the pattern "friend *" that does the following:


local result = {}
local name = string.lower(%1)
for i,v in ipairs(friends) do
   if string.find(string.lower(v),name) ~= nil then
      table.insert(result,v)
   end
end
print("There are "..#result.." "..%1.." in your table:")
for i,v in ipairs(result) do
   print(v)
end

You may want to replace the print commands with something like Note or ColourNote.

AquaBrother Brazil Mon 22 Nov 2010 06:17 PM #4

hehe, thx Fiendish i appreciate your help, i think that will work for now...

Thx for your time =)

Best regards

Nick Gammon Australia Forum Administrator Mon 22 Nov 2010 08:28 PM #5

Fiendish said:


local result = {}
local name = string.lower(%1)

You need to quote the %1 there (and further down), otherwise it expands to:


local name = string.lower(Mike)

... which is referring to the non-existent variable Mike.

It should read:


local result = {}
local name = string.lower("%1")

Ditto for lower down where it displays the results.


print("There are " .. #result .." %1 in your table:")

It would also help to make a "plain" search in case you happened to search for (say) ^Mike, so it could read:


if string.find (v:lower (), name, 1, true) then

Fiendish USA Global Moderator Mon 22 Nov 2010 08:34 PM #6

Heh. I suppose I should have actually tried it out first. :)