I'm trying to debug a Lua module. Here's my test input:

function test(frame)
local t = {}
t[1] = 2
return t
end

print(test())

This input returns the string "table". This is really unhelpful and very annoying. I want to dump the table. The string "table" provides almost no value to me at all.

It would be very helpful to have a function that can print something similar to this:

print_table(t)

t = { 1 = 2 }

Looking around the Web, it seems that this is a fairly common issue in Lua:

• http://www.luafaq.org/#T1.15
• http://lua-users.org/wiki/TableSerialization
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9168058/lua-beginner-table-dump-to-console

I'd like for there to be a built-in function (similar to print_r or var_dump in PHP or the print statement in Python 2) that allows easy dumping/printing/serialization of a Lua table for debugging purposes.

Version: unspecified
Severity: enhancement