else

What happens when none of the if or elseif statements evaluate to true? No chunk of code is executed. But, you might want some chunk of code to execute when none of the if/elseif arguments are true. This is what the else statement does. It executes a chunk of code when none of the statements tested by the preceding if/elseif tests were true.

Syntactically, the else statement is just an else/end chunk. The else statement always comes last, as demonstrated by the following code:

print ("Enter your name")
name = io.read()

if #name <= 3 then
    print ("that's a short name, " .. name)
elseif #name <= 6 then
    print (name .. " is an average length name")
else
    print ("that's a long name, " .. name)
end

There can be only one else statement, and it must be at the end of your if/elseif logic. An else does not have to follow an elseif; it could simply follow an if:

print ("Enter a number")
x = io.read()

if x % 2 == 0 then
    print (x .. " is even")
else
    print (x .. " is odd")
end