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string.find (s, pattern [, init [, plain]])
Looks for the first match of pattern in the string s. If it finds a match, then find returns the indices of s where this occurrence starts and ends; otherwise, it returns nil. A third, optional numerical argument init specifies where to start the search; its default value is 1 and can be negative. A value of true as a fourth, optional argument plain turns off the pattern matching facilities, so the function does a plain "find substring" operation, with no characters in pattern being considered "magic". Note that if plain is given, then init must be given as well.
If the pattern has captures, then in a successful match the captured values are also returned, after the two indices.
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string.format (formatstring, ···)
Returns a formatted version of its variable number of arguments following the description given in its first argument (which must be a string). The format string follows the same rules as the printf family of standard C functions. The only differences are that the options/modifiers *, l, L, n, p, and h are not supported and that there is an extra option, q. The q option formats a string in a form suitable to be safely read back by the Lua interpreter: the string is written between double quotes, and all double quotes, newlines, embedded zeros, and backslashes in the string are correctly escaped when written. For instance, the call
string.format('%q', 'a string with "quotes" and
new line')
will produce the string:
"a string with \"quotes\" and \
new line"
The options c, d, E, e, f, g, G, i, o, u, X, and x all expect a number as argument, whereas q and s expect a string.
This function does not accept string values containing embedded zeros, except as arguments to the q option.
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string.gmatch (s, pattern)
Returns an iterator function that, each time it is called, returns the next captures from pattern over string s. If pattern specifies no captures, then the whole match is produced in each call.
As an example, the following loop
s = "hello world from Lua"
for w in string.gmatch(s, "%a+") do
print(w)
end
will iterate over all the words from string s, printing one per line. The next example collects all pairs key=value from the given string into a table:
t = {}
s = "from=world, to=Lua"
for k, v in string.gmatch(s, "(%w+)=(%w+)") do
t[k] = v
end
For this function, a '^' at the start of a pattern does not work as an anchor, as this would prevent the iteration.
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string.gsub (s, pattern, repl [, n])
5. Standard libraries
Start from the beginning
