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A quick overview of Lua^rt

Some computation

We can now use Lua^rt to compute computations the same way as standard Lua :

As you can see, Lua is capable of handling a range of mathematical operations, thanks to its math module and bits operators.

Iterables

Lua^rt offers iterable values, which can be iterated over. The term iterable refers to values that contain elements that can be iterated over one by one with the global each() function :

In this example, you may have guessed that strings in Lua^rt are iterable character by character. Nonetheless, Lua^rt provides string properties that are not limited to this.

UTF8 strings

Since Lua 5.3 a new module utf8 is available to help developers with UTF8 encoded strings. But this greatly complicates the use of UTF8 strings, as it uses specific functions. A kind of overlay over strings. Not very friendly : in other modern programming languages, strings are containers for characters and support natively multibytes encodings.

Lua^rt have dedicated UTF8 string functions, to preserve standard Lua string compatibility :

Here, we defined a summer_infrench variable containing the string "été" (it's the word "summer" in french !). This string contains 3 characters but the result of the string.len() operator is 5 ! It's because Lua's string.len() function always returns the number of bytes that a string occupies in memory, not the character length. Lua^rt provides a specfic length function for UTF8 strings string.ulen() (note the u prefix, that stands for UTF8). Let's now check that the UTF8 character string "été" contains 5 bytes in memory :