What is the difference between ipairs and pairs in for loops?

Help and Feedback Scripting Support
#1

Hello, I have been pondering over this question for quite a few years, and now I feel that it should be brought to light. What is the difference?

eg

-- #1
for _,v in pairs(game.Players:GetPlayers()) do
        print(v)
end

-- #2 
for _,v in ipairs(game.Players:GetPlayers()) do
        print(v)
end

Both of these lines seem to function identically, and I have used ipairs and pairs interchangeably as a result.

7 Likes
Help using loops
Is there a difference between in pairs and ipairs?
#2

You shouldn’t use them interchangeably, as they have different behaviour when you really try them.

The difference is, with ipairs, you only traverse the array part of a table, and if nil is encountered, ipairs, or I should say the function it returns, stops in its tracks.

Here is an example:

t = {9.734, 8, nil, "nice"}

for _, v in ipairs(t) do
    print(v)
end

Output

9.734
8

If you want to guarantee order, use ipairs/numeric for loop.

This link explains a way ipairs can be written and explains how ipairs works too.

44 Likes
Making a GUI disappear
#3

From all of my research, nobody has mentioned this. Thanks a bunch!

3 Likes
#4

So in pairs doesnt guarantee order even in an array?

#5

Apologies for the bump - just have a follow-up question.

I’ve seen countless explanations of the differences between pairs and ipairs, but no explanation as to when we would actually want to rather use ipairs over pairs.

Isn’t the guaranteed “safety” of the pairs loop, as well as its ability to pinpoint multiple nil values after the first nil has been found, much better than that of ipairs, which just ends as soon as it sees a nil in the array?

Personally, I would just perform a pairs loop and check for nil if I ever had an array that had the possibility of having nil values. So perhaps there is no big difference, and it just depends on your preferred coding style?

#6

(You can search it up, there are some articles on devforum about that)

#7

Oh trust me, I tried doing the research before necrobumping - one thing I did find on a devforum post was that using ipairs is recommended for finding the indices of a table… but again I feel that it’s easier to just use pairs, or honestly probably just a regular for loop for that. I don’t see the situations where using ipairs is more beneficial.

I guess I just want to know some applications / real-world examples of using ipairs, because it seems somewhat irrelevant for most cases - unless, as I said, it’s just a preference thing! Or maybe, I’m completely missing a key aspect of ipairs that makes it better in certain cases… :stuck_out_tongue:

#8

Using ipairs just shows you’re working with arrays, it’s even designed just for that (doesn’t work with non-numeric indices since in the iterator function ipairs returns, a number is incremented until #t and the index and value is returned as i, t[i] - and non-numeric indices are not the same as numeric ones ).

There’s only negligible difference in the amount of time it takes iterating in ipairs than pairs (former is faster (and faster in Luau as well in general), recommended to be used with arrays) .

pairs I noticed does guarantee order even when iterating through arrays, this is probably something relatively new with Luau.

1 Like