CODEWITHSUNDEEP
lua
Arthur Attout
Arthur Attout

Reputation: 2926

LUA 5.4.0 live demo isn't consistent with binary

I downloaded the latest binary for Windows of LUA 5.4.0, through the official source.

When using the live demo if I write the following code :

print(string.byte("§",1))
print(string.byte("§",2))

It returns

194 
167

However, if I use the windows binary :

PS C:\Users\200207121> lua54
Lua 5.4.0  Copyright (C) 1994-2020 Lua.org, PUC-Rio
> print(string.byte("§",1)); print(string.byte("§",2))

It returns

245

>

Both the live demo and my installation use LUA 5.4.0. There is no other LUA libraries installed on my system.

Why do the outputs differ ?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 94

Answers (1)

IS4
IS4

Reputation: 13207

§ (U+00A7) is a non-ASCII character, thus its encoding can differ between platforms.

There is no difference between the binaries; the web version simply uses UTF-8 for input. Lua strings are encoding-agnostic, so it will simply treat the characters you input as bytes (0xC2 0xA7).

Your terminal where you run Lua uses an old (single-byte) OEM code page, where § is 0xF5, hence the single byte. Lua again simply treats your input as bytes, and it only displays what you enter.

This has been true for all Lua versions.

Upvotes: 2

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