How to store user input?

I am trying to make a rpg type game, I'm still kind of noobish at computercraft and my code is bunched up and I don't tab. I'm trying to get my game to remember what my player picks for the first question, what weapon do you choose sword or bow? So that I can use it for skill trees. Help?

pastebin get HTEgGnKF game also this is my code if you would like to see and or edit it.

A link, for convenience.

When you're getting user input, you're storing it in a variable called "input". You can have lots of variables - generally, whenever you type in a word Lua doesn't understand, it'll assume you want to treat that term as a new variable.

So, consider using a variable called "weapon" (instead of "input") when asking the player about their starting weapon, then take care not to overwrite that new "weapon" variable later.

Ok I get it, weapon = read() and so on thanks for the info, I learned about input = read() in a simple unhackable computer lock and I thought you had to use input each time, thanks.

You should also prefix your variables with "local" the first time they're declared. Otherwise, they're considered global and all programs will have access to them.
E.g:

local input = read() --# Store the read value in "input"
input = read() --# Do it again. Local is not required because "input" already exists.

EDIT:
Looking through your code, you can simplify stuff like

if input == "left" or input == "Left" then

with this:

if input:lower() == "left" then

input:lower() is the same as string.lower(input) and will set all characters in the string to their lower case equivalent.
E.g: string.lower("HeLLo") -> "hello"

may be a bit late on the help train, but tables would be great for an rpg game. for example, you'd save the current table row to a variable, then you'd do something like

curLine = 1
while true do
    tInput[curLine] = read()
    curLine = curLine+1
end

which would store every user input into a table. for weapons and things, you could use a table for that. something like this

tWeapon = {}
tWeapon["name"] = "Sauron's Flame"
tWeapon["damage"] = 10
tWeapon["durability"] = uses

obviously the variable uses would have to be defined, but something like that would work