Split string in Lua?

Question

I need to do a simple split of a string, but there doesn't seem to be a function for this, and the manual way I tested didn't seem to work. How would I do it?

Answer 1

Here is my really simple solution. Use the gmatch function to capture strings which contain at least one character of anything other than the desired separator. The separator is **any* whitespace (%s in Lua) by default:

function mysplit (inputstr, sep)
        if sep == nil then
                sep = "%s"
        end
        local t={}
        for str in string.gmatch(inputstr, "([^"..sep.."]+)") do
                table.insert(t, str)
        end
        return t
end

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