NInicoloren·Jan 31, 2025
You can use inspect.lua to debug tables [1]
[1] https://github.com/kikito/inspect.lua
In Show HN: Ldump – serialize any Lua datakikito
inspect.lua
Lua2021–2025
kikito / inspect.lua
inspect.lua
Human-readable representation of Lua tables
4Distinct people
4Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
1.5KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Human-readable representation of Lua tables
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
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Also in these discussions
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 12:54:37 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year4 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2021-01-15 20:32:18 UTC to 2025-01-31 11:44:38 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
4 sourcesI found https://github.com/kikito/inspect.lua, haven't tried it yet.
In Show HN: Wat – Deep inspection of Python objectsMy libraries were originally made in Lua in order for me to better work with and learn the LÖVE framework.
* inspect.lua [1] is the most popular one. It transforms any Lua value (including deeply nested tables) into human-readable strings. It is very useful for debugging all kinds of Lua projects, not just games. It is a partial reason why I got my current web dev job at Kong.
* middleclass [2] is somewhat popular amongst people coming into Lua from OOP languages. I don't use it myself anymore and consider it a bit of a "clutch". Still, it has helped a lot of people.
* bump.lua [3] is a box-based collision detection and resolution library. The later part has some known bugs I never figured out. Still has been used by some people to do some fun stuff.
* gamera.lua [4] is a minimalist camera-system for LÖVE.
* anim8 [5] is an animation libr
Read the rest
ary for LÖVE
There's many other projects on my github profile. I must warn you that they are all in several degrees of disrepair, I pretty much abandoned all of my open source efforts when my first child was born. Ran out of free time and energy.
These days, when I want to scratch my game-making itch, I fire up PICO-8, an even more minimalistic gamedev environment than LÖVE. I find the limitations it imposes refreshing. It also means that I cannot use most of my old libraries. Which is fine.
[1] https://github.com/kikito/inspect.lua
[2] https://github.com/kikito/middleclass
[3] https://github.com/kikito/bump.lua
[4] https://github.com/kikito/gamera.lua
[5] https://github.com/kikito/anim8
For more complex string matching tasks that the built-in patterns cannot handle, LPeg might be a good choice. I think it's not likely that something like PCRE-compatible regular expressions would be included in the Lua standard library because PCRE is fairly large, by Lua standards.
By the way, for formatting Lua tables for debugging I like using "inspect". (It's not part of the standard library but oh well, that's the whole topic
of today's discussion).
http://www.inf.puc-rio.br/~roberto/lpeg/
https://github.com/kikito/inspect.lua
In Lua and Python (2020)