Question

I am trying to reverse a string in Lua without using the string.reverse() function. Here is my code –

 function reverseStr(s)
   return string.gsub(s, "(.)(.)", "%2%1")
 end

The code is currently only reversing the first two characters in the string, and I am wondering what I can do to make the function reverse every character in the string.

abc — cba
bbc — cbb
dka — akd

Thank you!

Answer 1

You can’t make Lua’s pattern matching system reverse a string. You have to either write the obvious reversing code (iterating through the string backwards, building a new table from strings in reverse order, and using table.concat) or use string.reverse.