Understanding how to access values in array of tables in lua

Question

teaching myself lua and trying to work out how to access keys and values in nested tables when you have an array of them. If I had for example the following table:

local coupledNumbers = {}
local a = 10
for i = 1, 12 do
    for j = 1, 12 do
        table.insert(coupledNumbers, {ID = a, result = i*j})
        a = a + 10
    end
end

This loop will give me the keys (1 to 144)

for k, v in pairs (coupledNumbers) do
    print (k)
end

This loop will give me the values (something along the lines of: table: 0xc475fce7d82c60ea)

for k, v in pairs (coupledNumbers) do
    print (v)
end

My question is how do I get into the values inside the table?

how do I get ID and result. I thought something like that would work:

print (coupledNumbers[1].["ID"])

or

print (coupledNumbers[1].["result"])

But it gives an error.

Answer 1

Dot notation and bracket notation are distinct. Your error is using both of them to index one thing. ([1].["ID"]) The problem is the .[

Dot notation: Table.a.b

Bracket notation: Table["a"]["b"]

If you want to mix them, you could do Table.a["b"] or Table["a"].b

So you want to do something like coupledNumbers[1].ID or coupledNumbers[1]["ID"]

It's really just personal preference as far as I know edit: See Pedro's answer for information on the use of variables in dot notation., although you can't get the nth item of an array with dot notation so you'll always index a number using[n]