How to obtain vale count from table?

[Lur]

Hello everyone.
I got a small problem writing a little addon.

There is GetGossipAvailableQuests() frunction

Let's imagine we are talking with a NPC with 3 available quests. So if I want to iterate all returned quests, I write something like:

local q = {GetGossipAvailableQuests()} 
for i=1, #q, 5 do 
   print(q[i])
end

The question is:
1. why #q returns correct count while documentation says that next after first nil value index are returned even if there are another non-nil values
2. why select("#", q) doesn't work correct then?

Thanks a lot!