Literals and output in Lua

• Screen output is done with the command print.
• There are brackets around the parameters.
• Multiple parameter are separated by commas.

• Strings are defined with ' and ".

Test-Programm print_1.lua

print	('1: Hello World')
print ("2: Hello World")

The Result:

1: Hello World
2: Hello World

New lines

Test-Programm print_2a.lua

print ( '1: Hello\
	World' )
print ( "2: Hello\
	World" )

The Result:

1: Hello
	World
2: Hello
	World

Test-Programm print_2b.lua

print ( '5: Hello\n World' )
print ( "6: Hello\n World" )

The Result:

5: Hello
 World
6: Hello
 World

Alternative String definition

You can define Strings also with [ [ and ] ].

Test-Programm print_3a.lua

print [[Hello World]]

The Result:

Hello World

Test-Programm print_3b.lua

print [[Hello World,
you are so nice today.]]

The Result:

Hello World,
you are so nice today.

• Multiple lines are possible.

Test-Programm print_3c.lua

print [[
Hello World,
you are so nice today.]]

The Result:

Hello World,
you are so nice today.

• A new-line after [[ is ignored.

Test-Programm print_4_en.lua

print [[
Hello World,
how [[nice]] are you today]]

The Result:

Hello World,
how [[nice]] are you today

• The square braces may be nested.

Special Characters

Each character can be created with \ and the octal representation¹of the ASCII-value.

Named characters

Each character can be created with \ and the following short cut.

Character	Function	Shortcut
\a	PC-Sound	BEL
\b	Backspace	BS
\f	Form Feed	FF
\n	New line	LF
\r	carriage return	CR
\t	(horizontal) tabular	HT
\v	vertical tabular	VT
\	Backslash
	single quote
\"	double quote
\[	left square bracket
\]	right square bracket

Test-Programm print_5.lua

--~ print ( "\a", "\a" )
--~ print ( "\b", "\b" )
--~ print ( "\f", "\f" )
--~ print ( "\n", "\n" )
--~ print ( "\r", "\r" )
--~ print ( "\"", "\"" )
--~ print ( "\v", "\v" )
print ( "\"", "\"" )
print ( "\’", "\’" )
print ( "\"", "\"" )
print ( "\[", "\[" )
print ( "\]", "\]" )

The Result:

\"	"
\’	’
\"	"
\[	[
\]	]