It just occurred to me that it looks like Lua proper doesn't seem to have any way (or any obvious way) to list filenames in a given directory.

I was attempting to grab all *.txt files in a directory using io.popen("ls "..directory) when I realized that this would work only on systems with the ls command...basically just unix-like systems. Is there any way to use Lua to get a list of text files in a directory? I'd prefer not to have to use FLTK functions, since my script is intended to eventually work in both murgaLua and Lua.

I suppose I could use the "dir" command with popen, but I'm not sure how portable that is.

edit: oh...seems the dir command doesn't work on my linux system =op

edit2: I guess even trying fltk function might not work, although that's mainly because I can't make any sense of the fl_filename_list syntax (assuming this is will actually list files):

edit3: I guess "dir" actually does work on my system, but the results are inexplicably flawed. When i use dir in a terminal, the results are the same as using ls, but in the script the results are totally different:

This works as expected, but when I replace "ls" with "dir" I get completely different results.
I can't count on that to work across different platforms.

This post was last modified: 06-07-2007 12:36 PM by mikshaw.

I decided, after a long google session, to just go with what I have, which is using io.popen("ls").
It is definite...there is no directory listing in Lua.
If someone happens to want to run this script on Windows or pre-OSX Mac, they'll just have to edit it.

What about just using :

That's what I have it in there for :-)

You can then filter the .txt files quite easily (have a look at convertFluidToMurgaLua.lua for filtering examples).

Cheers
JohnM

Although I was hoping that the script could also work with Lua proper, this is definitely a better solution than popen. I was just pushing hard to avoid anything outside of pure Lua in this case.

However, I'm already using murgaLua.isDirectory() in the script, which I had planned to *eventually* convert to pure Lua code. The more I think about it, the more I wonder...if you wrote this function for murgaLua there must have been a reason for it, just like for murgaLua.readDirectory(). Perhaps a directory test in pure Lua is just as much work as a directory list.

I guess I'll stick with pure murgaLua =o)

Thanks.

This post was last modified: 06-08-2007 01:36 AM by mikshaw.

okie dokie...
To grab the filenames of all *.txt files in a given directory, this seems to be the most effective way:
allfiles=murgaLua.readDirectory("/home/mik")
for i=1,table.maxn(allfiles) do
if string.find(allfiles[i],"%.txt$") then print(allfiles[i]) end
end

Apparently table.getn(table) has the same result as table.maxn(table)
I dunno if one is actually better than the other.