Lua String replace

Question

How would i do this?

I got this:

name = "^aH^ai"
string.gsub(name, "^a", "")

which should return "Hi", but it grabs the caret character as a pattern character

What would be a work around for this? (must be done in gsub)

Shang

Because ^ is a special character, you need use % to escape it in Lua. – Terrigenous

Answer 1

Try:

name = "^aH^ai"
name = name:gsub("%^a", "")

See also: http://lua-users.org/wiki/StringLibraryTutorial

Gamogenesis

The tutorial uses a slightly different syntax. Why is gsub written with a : instead of a . in this answer? – Galasyn

@AndersonGreen: it can be called as a library function of the string library or as a method on a string object. The : is syntax sugar in Lua which effectively implies the object on which the method is called being passed as first parameter. – Crosshatch

What if we want to replace special characters with special character? like email = email:gsub("%+", "%2b"). Effectively we want to to URL Encode the + to %2b – Martlet