What does in pairs mean?

I was in a youtube video and i saw this

for _, thing in pairs (things) do 

what does _, means??

for loops loop through a table

for i, v in pairs(tbl) do

end

this loop goes through the table and runs the code with each index and value, the _ is put there because they don’t need the index

the index and value can be thought of as variables.

for index, value in pairs(tbl) do
   --index is the index of the current pair and value is the value of the current pair
end

ok so, there are two things being set up with in for _, thing.

The _ is basically just an index/number to signify the position of the value. Since a table is basically ordered from the first thing in the table to the last. Thing is just a reference to well… the thing.

For an example, there are 3 models in a folder. When you turn it into a table it goes like this

  1. Model1
  2. Model2
  3. Model3

The _ , thing is going to be “1, Model1” for example. The 1 being the position and Model1 being the Thing.

So if you want to access a certain amount things within a set number of Things, you use _ to do that kind of thing

Basicly what @PostVivic said. I normally use for i, v in pairs but some people will just write it in whatver way they want.

To add to this, developers tend to define the loop iterator with the _ symbol when they’re not planning to use it.

1 Like