Getting the value of a string in a table

I'm kind of a noob in CC, but I know my way around most things. My question: How can I take a string, and find it in a table, then get the index of it?

For example:
I enter the text "Bob", which is in my table. It searches the table, and returns "5", which means table[5].

How would I do this? I know how to get the text of a value (name = table[5]), but not the other way around.

You simply iterate the table:

function find(tab, val)
  for k, v in pairs(tab) do
    if v == val then
	  return k
    end
  end
end

You should go and check out these loops here http://www.lua.org/pil/4.3.4.html