Concatenation of tables in Lua

Question

ORIGINAL POST

Given that there is no built in function in Lua, I am in search of a function that allows me to append tables together. I have google

Answer 1

If you want to concatenate an existing table to a new one, this is the most concise way to do it:

local t = {3, 4, 5}
local concatenation = {1, 2, table.unpack(t)}

Although I'm not sure how good this is performance-wise.

Answer 2

Here is my implementation to concatenate a set of pure-integer-indexing tables, FYI.

1. define a function to concatenate two tables, concat_2tables

2. another recursive function concatenateTables: split the table list by unpack, and call concat_2tables to concatenate table1 and restTableList

   t1 = {1, 2, 3}
   t2 = {4, 5}
   t3 = {6}
   
   concat_2tables = function(table1, table2)
       len = table.getn(table1)
       for key, val in pairs(table2)do
           table1[key+len] = val
       end
       return table1
   end
   
   concatenateTables = function( tableList )
       if tableList==nil then
           return  nil
       elseif table.getn(tableList) == 1 then
           return  tableList[1]
       else
           table1 = tableList[1]
           restTableList = {unpack(tableList, 2)}
           return concat_2tables(table1, concatenateTables(restTableList))
       end
   end
   
   tt = {t1, t2, t3}
   t = concatenateTables(tt)  
   

Answer 3

If you want to merge two tables, but need a deep copy of the result table, for whatever reason, use the merge from another SO question on merging tables plus some deep copy code from lua-users.

(edit Well, maybe you can edit your question to provide a minimal example... If you mean that a table

 { a = 1, b = 2 }

concatenated with another table

{ a = 5, b = 10 }

should result in

{ a = 1, b = 2, a = 5, b = 10 }

then you're out of luck. Keys are unique.

It seems you want to have a list of pairs, like { { a, 1 }, { b, 2 }, { a, 5 }, { b, 10 } }. You could also use a final structure like { a = { 1, 5 }, b = { 2, 10 } }, depending on your application.

But the simple of notion of "concatenating" tables does not make sense with Lua tables. )