Array

Overview

Lua arrays are just Lua tables except they contain only numerical indices and the indices are consecutive starting at 1. When inserting or removing values from Lua arrays, you should use the table.insert() and table.remove() library functions.

Table Library

In Lua, the library called table is a collection of functions used to manipulate Lua tables as (numerically-indexed) arrays.

Array vs. Table

There is no special “array” type in Lua. Instead, Lua tables can be either associative arrays (key-value pairs) or numerically-indexed arrays (consecutive values).

Some function parameters or results in the Corona API expect a numerically-indexed array. In those cases, we explicitly mention the type as “array” instead of “table” to emphasize that the table should be a pure numerical array.