What does ~= do in Lua?... See it everywhere but still confused on what it does

The ~= symbol means not equal

So basically saying

if exampleVarriable is not equal to nil then print("something...")

~= means not equal. For example, 1 ~= 2

If both numbers(or strings, or tables, etc.) are not equal to each other, it will return true. If both are equal, it will return false.

~= is Lua's inequality comparison operator.

a ~= b will evaluate to true if a and b are not equal. However if either a or b have a metatable with an __eq field set to a function then Lua will call that function instead. To avoid calling this function and perform a raw comparison, Lua provides a function call rawequal which compares a and b without invoking the __eq metamethod.

This last bit of information is really only of use to you if you make use of metatables, but I found it interesting to bring up anyway.

An interesting thing to note about equality comparisons is that {} == {} will never be true, as tables are compared by reference and not by value. This means that a variable holding a table will only ever be equal to another if the second refers to the same table in memory:

Yet another thing to note is that NaN -- a special number constant meaning "Not a Number" and returned by undefined math operations -- equals nothing, not even itself.

"==" ---> Equal to "~=" ---> Different