-- print contents of a table, with keys sorted. second parameter is optional, used for indenting subtables function dump(t,indent) local names = {} if not indent then indent = "" end for n,g in pairs(t) do table.insert(names,n) end table.sort(names) for i,n in pairs(names) do local v = t[n] if type(v) == "table" then if(v==t) then -- prevent endless loop if table contains reference to itself print(indent..tostring(n)..": <-") else print(indent..tostring(n)..":") dump(v,indent.." ") end else if type(v) == "function" then print(indent..tostring(n).."()") else print(indent..tostring(n)..": "..tostring(v)) end end end end -- Use this function to perform your initial setup function setup() dump(_G) -- _G is the globals table in lua end -- This function gets called once every frame function draw() end
Nice! Very informative output.
I love this - very handy!
But I want more - with persistent data coming down the pipe any day now, we’re going to want serialization; and since the persistence isn’t 8-bit clean, we can’t play tricky games with memory blobs (not that we can get to that anyway) So what we really want is what perl’s Data::Dumper does - something that spits out nice, human-readable machine-parsible source code.
This is another “I’m not requesting it because we can roll our own” project. Someone out there has to have run into and solved, and shared - we just have to find it and adapt it, and make it our own. And paste it into every project until we can get shared libraries 
To the googles!