Fledgling dev flailing their way through a magical girl apocalypse

Dev diaries
7

We have multiple lines!

It was both easier and more difficult than I thought. My original plan was to build a table with reference numbers and then cycle through what was displayed with fun and math. Then I discovered table.insert included references, and table.remove happily removes the lowest. Talk about a time saver!

Then I spent the next few hours running in circles between strings table string table table not a table a string in a table table no not that table table table string untangle the string of tables!

Trying to figure out where a string ended up a table ended up a string was like

Also, table.concat doesn’t like new lines, but that’s fine, I put them in the strings near the beginning instead.

Whew.

Then with a little fiddling and guessing, the table of strings played nicely with concat and

In the end, 6 functions and dozens of lines of code and debug messages became… ducttape.script!

-- initial variables

--[[

So, my thoughts on this.
Need to display multiple lines.
So build a series of text messages and glue them together?
* get the line from "reachchatlog.script" (as a message)
* put line in an array
* format array as a single opbject to be displayed?
* send object to test_http.gui for display
* wait for next line 
* older lines need removed
* add to array and reformat
* send new array to "test_http.gui"

--]]

local scriptn = "ducttape.script "										-- debug 
local functn = "functn "												-- debug 
local message_table_lines = 10											-- show last 10 lines from log 
local message_table = {}												-- behold! A table!

function init(self)
--	self.message_table = {}
end

function on_message(self, message_id, message, sender)
	local functn = "on_message "
	if message_id == hash("log_message") then										-- check the message name 
		local taped_message = message.user .. ": ".. message.body .. "\n"			-- put it together. don't use {} here.
		local ducttaped = taped_message												-- I really wanted to use ducttaped.
--			print(scriptn .. functn .. "taped_message " .. taped_message)			-- debug 
		table.insert(message_table, ducttaped)										-- put string in table at pos n+1
--			print(scriptn .. functn .. "message stored I hope")						-- debug 
		local table_entries = table.maxn(message_table)								-- see how many entries are in the table 
--			print(scriptn .. functn .. "table entries: " .. table_entries)			-- debug 
		if table_entries >= message_table_lines then								-- if there are more entires than X
			table.remove(message_table, 1)											-- remove first entry 
		--	print(scriptn .. functn .. "removed message")							-- debug 
		else
			print(scriptn .. functn .. "no messages to remove, works fine to here.")	-- debug 
		end
		if table.maxn(message_table) >=1 then										-- if there is a message
			message_to_send = table.concat(message_table)
			msg.post("go#test_http", "new_message_table", {table = message_to_send}) -- send messge to the GUI script 
--			print(scriptn .. functn .. "sent message to test_http")					-- debug 
		else
			print(scriptn .. functn .. " nil table")								-- debug 
		end
	end
end

I also went through the other scripts and commented out debug prints. 30 lines of debugging for one line of text was getting silly. (:

Of special help in today’s adventure was Egor Skriptunoff’s comment in LUA - invalid value (table) at index 1 in table for 'concat' - Stack Overflow

And some comments here Table binding (passing tables as reference) - #3 by Vik and Table binding (passing tables as reference) - #3 by Vik

And now, for tomorrow!

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