Lua - Array to String Conversion

Array is an ordered arrangement of objects whereas string is a continous sequence of characters. There is no library method available to convert an array to string but we can use concatenate operator to concatenate entries of an array to get a string from an array.

-- iterate the array
for i = 1, #array do
   -- concatenate the array entries to a string
   text = text .. array[i]   
end

Example - Array to String Conversion

In following example, we've used the above approach to convert an array of characters to a string and result is printed.

main.lua

-- create an array of chars
array = {"H", "E", "L","L","O", " ", "W","O","R","L","D","!"}

-- string variable
text = ""

-- iterate the array
for i = 1, #array do
   -- concatenate the values to the string
   text = text .. array[i]   
end

-- print the string
print(text)

Output

When we run the above code, we will get the following output−

HELLO WORLD

Example - Array to String Conversion using function

In following example, we've created a toString() method which can be used to convert any array to a string and result is printed.

main.lua

-- create a function to convert an array to string
table.toString = function(array)
   -- string variable
   text = ""

   -- iterate the array
   for i = 1, #array do
      -- concatenate the values to the string
      text = text .. array[i]   
   end
   -- return string representation
   return text
end

-- create an array of numbers
array = {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6}

text = table.toString(array)

-- print the string
print(text)

-- create an array of chars
array = {"H", "E", "L","L","O", " ", "W","O","R","L","D","!"}

text = table.toString(array)

-- print the string
print(text)

Output

When we run the above code, we will get the following output−

123456
HELLO WORLD!