Manual:Advanced Lua

Handling Tables in Lua

A good overview of tables is available on Lua's wiki in the TablesTutorial. Nick Gammon has also written a nice overview on how to deal with Lua tables.

How to use multilinematches[n][m]

multilinematches[n][m] is the compliment of matches[n] when matching multi-line triggers. multilinematches[n][m] stores its matches by lines, inside each line are the relevant matches to it. TThe following example can be tested on the MUD batmud.bat.org:

In the case of a multiline trigger with these 2 Perl regex as conditions:

^You have (\w+) (\w+) (\w+) (\w+)

^You are (\w+).*(\w+).*

The command "score" generates the following output on batMUD:

 You have an almost non-existent ability for avoiding hits.
 You are irreproachably kind.
 You have not completed any quests.
 You are refreshed, hungry, very young and brave.
 Conquer leads the human race.
 Hp:295/295 Sp:132/132 Ep:182/181 Exp:269 >

If you add this script to the trigger:

<lua> showMultimatches() </lua>

The script, i.e. the call to the function showMultimatches() generates this output: <lua>

-------------------------------------------------------
The table multimatches[n][m] contains:
-------------------------------------------------------
regex 1 captured: (multimatches[1][1-n])
          key=1 value=You have not completed any quests
          key=2 value=not
          key=3 value=completed
          key=4 value=any
          key=5 value=quests
regex 2 captured: (multimatches[2][1-n])
          key=1 value=You are refreshed, hungry, very young and brave
          key=2 value=refreshed
          key=3 value=young
          key=4 value=and
          key=5 value=brave
-------------------------------------------------------

</lua>

The function showMultimatches() prints out the content of the table multimatches[n][m]. You can now see what the table multimatches[][] contains in this case. The first trigger condition (=regex 1) got as the first full match "You have not completed any quests". This is stored in multimatches[1][1] as the value of key=1 in the sub-table matches[1] which, in turn, is the value of key=1 of the table multimatches[n][m].

The structure of the table multimatches: <lua> multimatches {

               1 = {
                      matches[1] of regex 1
                      matches[2] of regex 1
                      matches[3] of regex 1
                             ...
                      matches[m] of regex 1 },
               2 = {
                      matches[1] of regex 2
                      matches[2] of regex 2
                            ...
                      matches[m] of regex 2 },
                ...         ...
               n = {
                      matches[1] of regex n
                      matches[2] of regex n
                            ...
                      matches[m] of regex n }

} </lua> The sub-table matches[n] is the same table matches[n] you get when you have a standard non-multiline trigger. The value of the first key, i. e. matches[1], holds the first complete match of the regex. Subsequent keys hold the respective capture groups. For example: Let regex = "You have (\d+) gold and (\d+) silver" and the text from the MUD = "You have 5 gold and 7 silver coins in your bag." Then matches[1] contains "You have 5 gold and 7 silver", matches[2] = "5" and matches[3] = "7". In your script you could do:

<lua> myGold = myGold + tonumber( matches[2] ) mySilver = mySilver + tonumber( matches[3] ) </lua>

However, if you’d like to use this script in the context of a multiline trigger, matches[] would not be defined as there are more than one regex. You need to use multimatches[n][m] in multiline triggers. Above script would look like this if above regex would be the first regex in the multiline trigger:

<lua> myGold = myGold + tonumber( multimatches[1][2] ) mySilver = mySilver + tonumber( multimatches[1][3] ) </lua>

What makes multiline triggers really shine is the ability to react to MUD output that is spread over multiple lines and only fire the action (=run the script) if all conditions have been fulfilled in the specified amount of lines.