Do metatables work on tables? I was thinking something like:
local tab = {}
local metaTab = {
__index = function(tab, i)
print(tab, i)
end)
}
function tab:test(what)
print(what)
end
setmetatable(tab, metaTab)
tab:test("wat")
✓ ANSWER ACCEPTED
Do metatables work on methods (e.g. table:function)?
1 answer
✓ Accepted answer
Yes. In Lua 5.2+, that's the only thing metatables work with. In Lua 5.1 (what Roblox uses), metatables can be used with userdatas and tables.
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4 comments
No I mean will __index fire if I do table:function()
Oh, sorry for the late reply. The answer is yes... but not in your example. __index is only invoked when you're indexing a nil value, and tab.test isn't a nil value when you index it. Keep in mind this works because tab:test() is the same as tab.test(tab). A way to get around this would be to have a proxy and add test to the proxy instead, but still set tab's metatable to metaTab. Then, in __in...
dex index the proxy with the key that tab was indexed with, and return that value. This way, there will never be a value in tab so it'll always invoke __index. You can even set __newindex of tab to automatically insert the value into the proxy instead of tab.
Is there a way to do it indexed?