This is a series of public domain functions to provide some “glue” to the Lua language to fill in some gaps it has and make it more useful.
With the popularity of Roblox among children, I have decided to finally become proficient in Lua (I actually have been programming in Lua since 2007, with my ObHack project, but I am finally getting around to understanding Lua in depth).
Lua reminds me of Forth from the early 1980s: Like Forth, it has a steep learning curve. Like Forth, it is an incredibly powerful programming lanauge in a very compact package.
This is a series of functions to fill in the gaps lacking from the base Lua package. For example, table (dictionary/hash/associative array) traversal is non-deterministic in Lua; I have routines with deterministic traversal.
tableStuff.lua: This has tablePrint(), which will print to standard
output the entire contents of a table, including all sub-tables. It includes
infinite loop protection; circular references will not be traversed. This
also has sPairs() which is a (mostly) deterministic version of Lua’s
pairs() table traversal routine. There are also routines which are
akin to Python’s copy.deepcopy() (tableCopyR()) and ways to sort
tables differently.
regexStuff.lua: While Lua comes with a fairly powerful, if quirky, regular
expression engine (Read: The engine, in the interests of keeping code size
down, is not Perl Regular Expression compatible), the engine does not
include split; this includes a simple rCharSplit() function to split
a string on single characters (or to split on whitespace using %s).
There is also routines for splitting CSV files (including annoying
quoted CSV) and making nice human-readable numbers.
rg32PureLua.lua: This is an implemention of RadioGatún[32] using pure
Lua 5.1. This is not a fast implementation, but it allows one to have
RadioGatún in places running Lua 5.1 which do not allow libraries to
be loaded.
rg32bit32.lua: This implementation of RadioGatún[32] uses the
Lua 5.2+, Lunacy, and Roblox-Lua bit32 library to get better
performance than with the pure Lua 5.1 implementation.
fileStuff.lua: This, along with luafilesystem (lfs) allows one to
manipulate files.
Tests are also included.
This code is designed to run in Lua 5.1 and Lua 5.3. It should be able to run in other versions of Lua (5.1 or higher) without issue.