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Lua 5.3 Reference Manual

Copyright © 2015 Lua.org, PUC-Rio. Freely available under the terms of the Lua license.

Standard Libraries

The standard Lua libraries provide useful functions that are implemented directly through the C API. Some of these functions provide essential services to the language (e.g., type and getmetatable); others provide access to "outside" services; and others could be implemented in Lua itself, but are quite useful or have critical performance requirements that deserve an implementation in C (e.g., table.sort).

All libraries are implemented through the official C API and are provided as separate C modules. Currently, Lua has the following standard libraries:

• 1 – Basic Functions
• 2 – Modules
• 3 – String Manipulation
  • 3.1 – Patterns
  • 3.2 – Format Strings for Pack and Unpack
• 4 – UTF-8 Support
• 5 – Table Manipulation
• 6 – Mathematical Functions (sin, log, etc.)
• 7 – Operating System Facilities

Except for the basic and the package libraries, each library provides all its functions as fields of a global table or as methods of its objects.

Last update: Fri Nov 27 18:43:18 BRST 2015