make integer 01 instead of 1

[Spawnova]

I'm trying to make and integer "01" instead of "1" but it's not working, here's what i've been trying

int=tonumber("0"..int)

but it still returns 1

[Seerah]

You may well have to store it as a string.

[Malsomnus]

Sounds like you want a string, and not a number. You should remove the tonumber call.

[Spawnova]

I didn't know you could add one string to another, that works =)

[Dridzt]

("%02d"):format(1) -> '01'
("%05d"):format(25) -> '00025'

Or let's say you want right-aligned strings with spaces instead of zeros.
("% 5d"):format(1)
("% 5d"):format(11)
("% 5d"):format(1111) ->

    1
   11
 1111

[Phanx]

Originally Posted by Spawnova I didn't know you could add one string to another, that works =)

Just FYI that's not addition. Addition is a mathematical operation (eg. 2 + 2 -> 4) performed on numbers. The joining of strings together (eg. "a" .. "b" -> "ab") is called concatenation.

[Vlad]

format is a great tool for simple things, you can deal with a lot of stuff like argument order (for locale, making it much easier to translate if the order of the inserted variables change from language to language), alter how float and numbers appear, even append spacing to strings.

[Phanx]

Originally Posted by Vlad format is a great tool for simple things, you can deal with a lot of stuff like argument order (for locale, making it much easier to translate if the order of the inserted variables change from language to language), ...

To clarify, because this is really useful, here's an example:

format("%1$s's %2$s is %3$s", "John", "cat", "happy")
-> John's cat is happy.

Pretty straightforward for English. But what about other languages where the order of words is different?

format("%2$s de %1$s está %3$s.", "Juan", "El gato", "feliz")
-> El gado de Juan está feliz.

So, you could assign the format pattern to, say, L["FormatPattern"] and localizers change the order of words appropriately. You don't need to know which order that is -- you just pass in the variables in the same order you would for English.

You don't have to use the %s token only, or exclusively; you can mix any format tokens, as long as they have <number>$ between the % and the token key: "%1$s has %2$d for %3$0.2f" works fine.

You'll see this used in many of Blizzard's combat log strings.

[Ketho]

Originally Posted by Phanx To clarify, because this is really useful, here's an example: [...]

Can you explain why/how this works in the WoW Lua, but not in the normal Lua?

I tried it on the Live Demo and the (5.2) binary
The Wowpedia format() page also doesn't mention this use

I never realized this functionality until now and I'm wondering if there is more documentation about it

[Torhal]

This is a forward port by the WoW team from Lua 4.0 to their version of Lua 5.1. Here's the relevant page in the Lua 4.0 Reference Manual.

EDIT: For those who just want the juicy bits:

Conversions can be applied to the n-th argument in the argument list, rather than the next unused argument. In this case, the conversion character % is replaced by the sequence %d$, where d is a decimal digit in the range [1,9], giving the position of the argument in the argument list. For instance, the call format("%2$d -> %1$03d", 1, 34) will result in "34 -> 001". The same argument can be used in more than one conversion.

[Phanx]

Originally Posted by Ketho Can you explain why/how this works in the WoW Lua, but not in the normal Lua?

It's the same reason why string.trim works in WoW Lua, but not in normal Lua -- because Blizzard added it there.