Reading data from a file / xls file or text file

Questions
1

I have a file with over 3000 lines and 30 columns, what would the best way of reading / searching the data until it finds what I want and then putting that info into a string for me to print out to the screen in the format I want.

I have used table pairs before but the data was inside its own tab and it only had max 20 lines and only 4 columns.

Thanks in advance for any help with my problem.

2

I’m not sure on the speed but have you checked out the string functions? I would save the xls to csv and use string.find or string.match depending on what you are trying to do.

lua string library - http://lua-users.org/wiki/StringLibraryTutorial

3

Thanks for that I will check it out, I am trying to lookup ( name) and return all other data connected to that name and then display on screen.