I have an array with all the attributes of a part. I will be using them later on but for now I wish to sort them into the same order as the materials array. I just can’t work out the logic, sometimes I get back the exact same table assortment and other times returns nothing. It shouldn’t be this hard but I’m getting frustrated now and not thinking clearly.
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Entries to tables with non-numeric keys have no “order” to speak of.
In Lua/Luau, tables have two partition: array and dictionary/hashtable. You can only sort values in array portion, which must have key-value pairs with numeric keys. However, in table2 your keys are strings, which means they are stored on the dictionary partition, which doesn’t have a concept of “order” because that’s not how they work by design.
May I ask why your data has to be ordered that way specifically? Maybe we could work out a better solution from there.
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You can “sort” the table by converting it into a numeric array instead:
local numeric = {}
for _, material in pairs(materials) do
table.insert(numeric, table2[material])
end
print(numeric[1]) --amount of logs
print(numeric[2]) --amount of food
--etc
Also to answer your question, no you can’t sort a dictionary. That’s because dictionaries as a data type aren’t meant to be looped over(like arrays/lists). That’s because they have known and specific keys(for example Coins, Speed, etc).
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Well Idk if ordering it is the best way. I will have a lot of buttons (tree-of-life) style game and I made one button. I added a lot of attributes that the game will use and I was working on the textlabels for all buttons. This way I can add any number of buttons and the script should set up all the textlabels with the correct cost, resources and rewards displayed. I figured ordering the table would make it easier to select different amounts of resources (tier1 requires logs, tier 2 requires logs and stone, tier 3 requires 3 resources) etc.
Then I can just loop through all the buttons in that tier and let the script set all the textlabels. Also with table2 set via table1 I can move the data around in table1 till I’m happy with the order . The script should set the labels correctly regardless of the order I set table1 to.
As stated, dictionaries don’t really have an order. You look it up by key. But, you can create a paired table with a specific order of you want. Like if table1 does exist, you can loop through table 1 and index into table 2 with the value from table 1.
for _, name in pairs(table1) do
print(table2[name])
end