String Indexing

You can index strings for their characters now, which is cleaner & 3x faster than using string.sub. String indexing only occurs when you index with an integer, either positive or negative. Positive integers index from the start of the string, and negative integers index from the end.

Example Code

local str = "hello world"
print(str[5]) -- "o"
print(str[200]) -- nil
print(str[-1]) -- "d"

Any character-intensive task — for example, a hash algorithm — will greatly benefit from this.

Try It Yourself

caution

The bytecode of this feature is not backwards-compatible with Lua.