Lua print on the same line

Question

In Pascal, I have write and writeln. Apparently Lua's print is similar to writeln of Pascal. Do we have something similar to write of Pascal? How can consecutive print commands send their output to the same line?

print("Hello")
print("World")

Output:

Hello
world

I want to have this:

Hello world

Answer 1

Use io.write instead print, which is meant for simple uses, like debugging, anyway.

Answer 2

Expanding on lhf's correct answer, the io library is preferred for production use.

The print function in the base library is implemented as a primitive capability. It allows for quick and dirty scripts that compute something and print an answer, with little control over its presentation. Its principle benefits are that it coerces all arguments to string and that it separates each argument in the output with tabs and supplies a newline.

Those advantages quickly become defects when detailed control of the output is required. For that, you really need to use io.write. If you mix print and io.write in the same program, you might trip over another defect. print uses the C stdout file handle explicitly. This means that if you use io.output to change the output file handle, io.write will do what you expect but print won't.

A good compromise can be to implement a replacement for print in terms of io.write. It could look as simple as this untested sample where I've tried to write clearly rather than optimally and still handle nil arguments "correctly":

local write = io.write
function print(...)
    local n = select("#",...)
    for i = 1,n do
        local v = tostring(select(i,...))
        write(v)
        if i~=n then write'\t' end
    end
    write'\n'
end

Once you are implementing your own version of print, then it can be tempting to improve it in other ways for your application. Using something with more formatting control than offered by tostring() is one good idea. Another is considering a separator other than a tab character.

Answer 3

As an alternative, just build up your string then write it out with a single print

You may not always have access to the io library.