Splitting and joining strings in Lua

Joining strings from a table is done with table.concat

-- "a,b,c"
table.concat({"a", "b", "c"}, ",")

Splitting strings is done using string.gmatch, it's a bit different than usual, it:

• Returns an iterator, rather than a table
• Takes in a pattern of all the characters that are NOT the delimiter

Split on whitespace:

local example = "an example string"

-- an
-- example
-- string
for i in string.gmatch(example, "%S+") do
   print(i)
end

From lua-users.org