Split string in Lua?

I need to do a simple split of a string, but there doesn't seem to be a function for this, and the manual way I tested didn't seem to work. How would I do it?

Here is my really simple solution. Use the gmatch function to capture strings which contain at least one character of anything other than the desired separator. The separator is **any* whitespace (%s in Lua) by default:

function mysplit (inputstr, sep)
        if sep == nil then
                sep = "%s"
        end
        local t={}
        for str in string.gmatch(inputstr, "([^"..sep.."]+)") do
                table.insert(t, str)
        end
        return t
end

.

If you are splitting a string in Lua, you should try the string.gmatch() or string.sub() methods. Use the string.sub() method if you know the index you wish to split the string at, or use the string.gmatch() if you will parse the string to find the location to split the string at.

Example using string.gmatch() from Lua 5.1 Reference Manual:

 t = {}
 s = "from=world, to=Lua"
 for k, v in string.gmatch(s, "(%w+)=(%w+)") do
   t[k] = v
 end

If you just want to iterate over the tokens, this is pretty neat:

line = "one, two and 3!"

for token in string.gmatch(line, "[^%s]+") do
   print(token)
end

Output:

one,

two

and

3!

Short explanation: the "[^%s]+" pattern matches to every non-empty string in between space characters.