:GetDescendants for tables

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#1

Hey,
I want to get all descendants of a table, but it’s not possible to get them by using ‘:GetDescendants()’.
The purpose is to use a for loop and check every “descendants” name (the current index) and do smth with those who have a specific names.
Exampe:

local x = {
a = 1, 
b  = 2, 
c = 3, 
d = {a = 5, b = 10}
}

So in this particular example I’m trying to get every descendant with the name “a”. But their located in different tables. I don’t know how many there are and don’t want to count them out for very huge tables.

#2

You can use a generic loop

for i, v in pairs(x) do
    --i will be a, b, c, d
    --v will be 1, 2, 3, {a = 5, b = 10}
end

Note that there is no specific order for keys that aren’t numbers.

Are you trying to instead “flatten” the table and iterate through every element, including a = 5 and b = 10?

#3

You will need a recursive function. It will work with a lot of layers too,. Here is a pseudo-code of that

-- Here I have the output where all the values in the table will be
local descendants = {}
local x = {
1,
2,
{3, 4}
{5, 6, {7, 8}}
}



function recursiveGetDescendants(table)
      for i, v in pairs(table) do
             if type(v) == "table" then
                    --Since it is a table, loop then through THAT table too.
                    recursiveGetDescendants(v)
             else
                    --Comes here if the value is NOT  table, so we just add it to output
                   table.insert(descendants, v)
             end
      end
end

-- Call the function to add all of X's values into  the table.
recursiveGetDescendants(x)