Question

I’m having trouble displaying the contents of a table which contains nested tables (n-deep). I’d like to just dump it to std out or the console via a print statement or something quick and dirty but I can’t figure out how. I’m looking for the rough equivalent that I’d get when printing an NSDictionary using gdb.

Answer 1

Feel free to browse the Lua Wiki on table serialization. It lists several ways on how to dump a table to the console.

You just have to choose which one suits you best. There are many ways to do it, but I usually end up using the one from Penlight:

> t = { a = { b = { c = "Hello world!", 1 }, 2, d = { 3 } } }
> require 'pl.pretty'.dump(t)
{
  a = {
    d = {
      3
    },
    b = {
      c = "Hello world!",
      1
    },
    2
  }
}