Selecting first table value and it gives nil

[vik45782 (Vik)]

Hi, so I have been working on random selection. But when I try to access 1 position in the table I get nil.

Here is my example table:

	Rarites = {
		Common ={title = "Common" ,rarity = 550};
		Rare = {title = "Rare" ,rarity =320};
		Epic = {title = "Epic" ,rarity =120};
		Legendary = {title = "Legendary" ,rarity =30};
		Mythic = {title = "Myhic" ,rarity =5};
	}

And here is an example attempt to get 1 position of the table withs prints nil

print(Rarites[1]) --- nil

So I don’t know how to access 1 item on the list without using its name. And I want to keep the format of the table.

[DataSigh]

You’re trying to mix the hash and array portion in a list but you can’t do that. The way you set the table up, you’re going to have to use Rarities.Common instead of [1]. Can’t do what you’re trying to do

[LegendOJ1 (Owen)]

What you’ve got here is not a standard table - it’s a dictionary. Dictionaries with string keys cannot be referenced with numbers because they do not have a specific order, regardless of whether in your code they do appear to be in a logical order.

For example, to reference the first index in your dictionary, you’d do Rarities["Common"], not Rarities[1], because items in dictionaries are referenced by keys rather than number positions.

There is a way to use numbers to reference the values of each dictionary key, but there’s no guarantee it’ll be in order. I wouldn’t recommend the following method if you’re relying on the order being the same every time, but it will allow you to reference the values with numbers whilst keeping the original format as a dictionary with string keys. The getValues() function simply returns a table with number indices.

local Rarities = {
	Common = { title = "Common", rarity = 550 };
	Rare = { title = "Rare", rarity = 320 };
	Epic = { title = "Epic", rarity = 120 };
	Legendary = { title = "Legendary", rarity = 30 };
	Mythic = { title = "Mythic", rarity = 5 };
}

local function getValues(dict: { [string]: any }): { any }
    local values = {}
    for _,v in Rarities do
        table.insert(values, v)
    end
    return values
end

local rarityValues = getValues(Rarities)
local common = rarityValues[1] -- but Common might not always be the first index...

For your particular case, and since you’re already storing the titles of the rarities inside the actual values, you could get around the issue by just using a numbered array instead. For that, you’d just change the keys of your dictionary to numbers. If there’s a reason why you’d need to loop through the rarities in order using ipairs or anything like that, you’ll want to do the following anyway:

local Rarities = {
	[1] = { title = "Common", rarity = 550 };
	[2] = { title = "Rare", rarity = 320 };
	[3] = { title = "Epic", rarity = 120 };
	[4] = { title = "Legendary", rarity = 30 };
	[5] = { title = "Mythic", rarity = 5 };
}

For more information on understanding dictionaries, check out:
Intro to Dictionaries | Documentation - Roblox Creator Hub

[DataSigh]

Yeah, if you for loop through a hash table its unordered so the values will be random