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.