dump-lua-array

Dump 1-dimensional Lua array into a file efficiently

Environmental Details

1. Ubuntu 14.04 LTS 64 Bit OS
2. Lua v5.1
3. GCC v4.8.4

Install Lua v5.1

1. Open terminal or press CTRL+ALT+T then use following command-

sudo apt-get install lua5.1

2. Install Lua headers by following command-

sudo apt-get install liblua5.1-0-dev

Compilation

Before proceding further make sure to download the code from the repository.

1. Open terminal or press CTRL+ALT+T
2. Compile C code using the following command-

gcc -I/usr/include/lua5.1 -o array.so -shared array.c -fPIC

The above command is going to produce shared object.

Read files

1. Compile C code using the following command-

gcc -o read read.c

2. Execute read from terminal

Usage

We can use the above shared object in Lua code as shown below-

-- add the shared object to our Lua code
-- make sure to keep 'array.so' along with this code
require "array"

-- define number of elements in our array
local n = 1000000

-- create array
local my_array = {}
for i=1,n do
  my_array[i] = i+1
end

-- now we have an array called 'my_array', 
-- which we want to dump into a file. there
-- are two ways to do it

-- case 1
-- create new array first
-- then call dump function
local arr = array.new(my_array)
array.dump(arr, "out.bin")

-- case 2
-- directly call dump function
array.dump(my_array, "out.bin")

-- if we use 'array.new', we can do much more as shown below
local i=1
print(string.format("size of arr:%d, my_array[%d]:%d, arr[%d]:%d", array.size(arr), i, my_array[i], i, array.get_element(arr, i)))

Note

Check out my blog post here for more information about it.

Issues (or Error Reporting)

Please check here and create issues accordingly.