Now this may just be my lua n00bness, but I think this behavior is a bug and will make me have to revisit all my games.
I’ve always made the assumption that #mytable would return the number of entries in a table. It does not. It returns a count of items until it hits the first “nil” entry.
See this block of code:
t = {}
print("#t = ", #t)
t[1] = "fred"
for i =1,3 do print(i,t[i]) end
print("#t = ", #t)
t[2] = "barney"
print("#t = ", #t)
for i =1,3 do print(i,t[i]) end
t[3] = "wilma"
print("#t = ", #t)
for i =1,3 do print(i,t[i]) end
t[2] = nil
print("#t = ", #t)
for i =1,3 do print(i,t[i]) end with these results:
#t = 0
1 fred
2 nil
3 nil
#t = 1
#t = 2
1 fred
2 barney
3 nil
#t = 3
1 fred
2 barney
3 wilma
#t = 1
1 fred
2 nil
3 wilma So basically I add a new entry to my table “t” one at a time. You see that #t increments as it should. By the time “wilma” is added to the list everything is working as necessary.
Then I nil out barney (the 2nd cell) and now #t returns 1, not 3.
This means if you are using a table to track your objects on screen and your player kills one in the middle and you are dependent on #table to return you the length of the table (or anytime else you’re using #table) you can expect problems.
Someone please do a quick test with the above code and sanity check me please…
Do I need to file this as a bug report?
Rob [import]uid: 19626 topic_id: 20784 reply_id: 320784[/import]