why does lua string.find return true for this test case?

Question

I'm just new to lua... and so I apologize if i'm missing something basic.
i'm running a simple test to see if i can find certain values in a string.

Here's the code:

print(string.find('fd@testca','.') )

Instead of failing, which is what I was expecting, I'm getting back:

mymachinename:/usr/share/std/test# lua test.lua
1       1

Can you tell me where I'm going wrong? Thanks.

Answer 1

This is because in Lua the find method looks for a pattern, and . represents any character.

You can use character sets to work around the problem:

print(string.find('fd@testca','[.]') )

Here is a link to a small demo.