So what is ipairs() and pairs()? I'm trying to find out.
A better explanation of
ipairs()
and
pairs()
would be that they both return an iterator function, or a function that is a loop but provides specific output defined by the function.
ipairs() iterates through only values in a table that are indexed by a number.
If you had a table such as this:
t = { [1] = 1, [2] = 2, [3] = 3, ["Four"] = 4 }
And you tried iterating through it with ipairs(), your output might look like this:
t = { [1] = 1, [2] = 2, [3] = 3, ["Four"] = 4 }
for index,value in ipairs( t ) do
print( value )
end
-- OUTPUT --
1
2
3
----------------
The reason for this difference is that ipairs() is slightly faster than pairs().
If you tried the same thing with pairs, you would get something like this:
t = { [1] = 1, [2] = 2, [3] = 3, ["Four"] = 4 }
for index,value in ipairs( t ) do
print( value )
end
-- OUTPUT --
1
2
3
4
----------------
In this case both indexes that are numerical and textual are printed. The difference in speed won't really matter unless you're being EXTREMELY conservative of your processing time.
As for
fs.list()
returning an unorganized table, this is not true from my experience.
From my understanding and an experiment I just ran, fs.list() returns an alphabetized list of all the files and directories in the directory passed as a parameter; directories or files take no precedence over each other in terms of alphabetization.
shell.setDir()
The above code's only parameter is a FULL path.
You have to specify the whole path or else it will go from the root directory to try and find the specified directory passed.
However, if you wanted to bypasses this problem and simulate jumping from the current directory to one inside the current directory you could try this:
shell.setDir( shell.dir() .. "/files" )
