Is there any way for me to fix this if statement?

Question

I am relatively new to coding on Lua but I have a little bit of experience in Python. I wanted to try something different where a random number would be rolled and you had to try and guess what the number would be. If you got it right the program would end and that would be it just something simple to work on in my free time. However, I ran into a problem with Lua where this if statement on Line 16 won't work.

print("Test")
print("--------------------------------------")

game = 1

x = math.random(1,6)

while game == 1 do
  x = math.random(1,6)
  io.write("Enter a number. If you roll that number on the dice you win: ")
  user_input = io.read()
  print(" ")
  print("You chose " .. user_input)
  print(" ")
  print(x)
  if user_input == x then -------------> this line doesn't work
    print(" ")
    print("You rolled the number you chose.")
    game = 2
  else
    print(" ")
    print("You did not roll the random number.")
    print("--------------------------------------")
  end
end

Answer 1

Replace if user_input == x then with if tonumber( user_input ) == x then. It ought to be obvious to you that user_input is a string, and x is a number; and there is no implicit type cast in Lua.

Bonuses:

• you can drop the parentheses in function calls, if the only parametre is a string or a table: f("a") → f'a',
• to end the loop, you can simply use break, getting rid of game variable altogether (use while ( true )),
• always, until you have some special reason not to, declare your variables as local. In your example this applies to x and user_input and would apply to game, were it not redundant,
• Lua has HereDoc syntax, so that you can replace:

    print(" ")
    print("You did not roll the random number.")
    print("--------------------------------------")

with

    print [[

You did not roll the random number.
--------------------------------------
]]

Answer 2

It appears that you are taking input from the console and storing it as a string. You currently are comparing a string to a integer. Which means that you will always end up in false. Here I changed your code to make it take input as a integer instead of a string so that the statement works now.

 print("Test")
 print("--------------------------------------")

 game = 1

 x = math.random(1,6)

 while game == 1 do
   x = math.random(1,6)
   io.write("Enter a number. If you roll that number on the dice you win: ")
   user_input = io.read("*number")
   print(" ")
   print("You chose " .. user_input)
   print(" ")
   print(x)
   if user_input == x then
     print(" ")
     print("You rolled the number you chose.")
     game = 2
   else
     print(" ")
     print("You did not roll the random number.")
     print("--------------------------------------")
   end
 end