Misc operators

The miscellaneous operators presented here do not fit into any of the previous groups. These operators are Lua constructs.

The assignment operator (=) changes the value of a variable. This operator has been used many times up until this point. The assignment operator allows for multiple assignment. All of the following are valid:

x = 2
y, z = 4, "hello"

The string concatenation operator (..) will combine two strings into a single string. This operator was covered in the String types section of this chapter. As a reminder, the syntax is:

hello = "hello,"
world = " world"
print (hello .. world)

Finally, the length operator (#) is a unary operator that will return the length of a string or a table. The use of this operator for strings has already been covered. The syntax of this operator is as follows:

print ("Enter a word: ")
word = io.read();
print (word .. " has " .. #word .. " letters!")