Is this an effective way of detecting if the player has a character?

if player.Character ~= nil then

If in this case “player” represents… well, the player, would this work effectively? Or is there a better way to do this?

Hi Read, this looks like it could work, but a more reliable way that I use for every time I need to check if the player has a character is this:

local character = Player.Character 
if not character or not character.Parent then
	character = Player.CharacterAdded:Wait()
end
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I believe that would work, you could also just do

if player.Character then

Since any value (except from false, 0, nil) is true.

To get a char you could also do:

game.Players.PlayerAdded:Connect(function(plr)
	plr.CharacterAdded:Connect(function(char)
		...
	end)
end)

But the above is not always a fitting solution.

‘0’ in Lua and subsequently Luau is considered truthy.

print(0 and true) --true
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A more concise way of achieving that would be the following:

local Character = Player.Character or Player.CharacterAdded:Wait()

Since it would default to waiting for the Character to load if it doesn’t exist already.

2 Likes