EASY: Length of table - how to count?

david19801

Hi, I have a table called actors:

local actors = {}

After I put things in to this how can I get a count of how many things are in it? I tried actors.length and actors.count. nothing...

ar2rsawseen

local cnt = #actors

Mells

Google -> lua table length

local count = #actors

Lua.org

The length of a table t is defined to be any integer index n such that t[n] is not nil and t[n+1] is nil; moreover, if t[1] is nil, n can be zero. For a regular array, with non-nil values from 1 to a given n, its length is exactly that n, the index of its last value. If the array has "holes" (that is, nil values between other non-nil values), then #t can be any of the indices that directly precedes a nil value (that is, it may consider any such nil value as the end of the array).

david19801

Thanks guys!

OZApps

@david, if you use

table.insert

then this works fine, however if you use names key value pairs or a zero index or a gap in the items,

#actors

will not return the correct length. The other way is to count them yourself by iterating through the list using

pairs

and if you want to count only the index type irrespective of the gaps in between, use the

ipairs

to iterate through the contents.