deleting something from table

[John Smith]

hello, if source element is in a table why can't i remove it like this?

playersTable[source] = nil 

the player is still in table somehow

edit: could it be because im inserting values with table.insert?

Edited December 31, 2014 by Guest

[Castillo]

Are you sure that 'source' is the correct element?

[John Smith]

yes its an element, i also tried putting strings in the table,everything on runcode as well and it just wouldnt remove it from table(checked by unpack function)

here an easy working example

  
randomTable = {} 
a = "i need to get removed from a table seriously" 
table.insert(randomTable,a) 
-- its inserted  
  
randomTable[a] = nil 
-- should remove it but doesn't for me. 
  

Edited December 31, 2014 by Guest

[Castillo]

Mind posting the rest of your code?

[John Smith]

i don't have a rest of code, i'm working on a prototype but i have found out about this issue while trying some table things in game, i edited my post above to show method how im manipulating table

[Castillo]

Well, now that you posted the way you insert to your table, I can see the problem.

That table is an indexed one, that's why you can't remove the items that way, you need to use it like this:

randomTable [ 1 ] = nil 

Or simply using:

table.remove ( randomTable, 1 ) 

[John Smith]

but if i have thousands of things in my table, how can i find out which "ID" is the thing which i want to remove?

also how come other scripts can use the above method with source like mine?

i saw freeroam lots of times using

playerBlips[source] = nil 

and it worked for them -- well, something like this.

Edited December 31, 2014 by Guest

[Castillo]

Because they store it this way:

randomTable = { } 
randomTable [ "my loling text" ] = "myData" 

Then you can do:

randomTable [ "my loling text" ] = nil 

[John Smith]

alright thanks.

just out of curiosity is there any other way to add/remove things in a table? i mean where it gets looped and stuff

[Gallardo9944]

playersTable[source] = nil 

^ works only when you used something like this before:

playersTable[source] = true 

If you have an indexed table, as Solidsnake14 pointed out, you have to remove that only by its position in the table.

If you want to communicate with the table by the elements and not by IDs, you could better use the way of playersTable[source] = true.

In other cases, you can loop through the table and remove the required position:

for i,v in ipairs(playersTable) do 
  if source == v then -- if there is such element 
    table.remove(playersTable,i) -- remove it from the table according to its index 
  end 
end 

^ this way is not really recommended, but works in case you want to know how it is made.

[John Smith]

alright thank you guys alot for help and i am very thankful for a very fast reply

and happy new year to both of you!

[Castillo]

You're welcome.

[John Smith]

hello i am a bit confused

something = {} 
something[#something+1] = {playerElement} 
something[#something+1] = {"text","another text",someVariable} 
  

so how would i find an exact thing that i want to delete? how would i know the id of thing to remove?

looping through it wouldnt help as in gallardo's example it would need to be v[1][1] for example at line 2

if anyone can help me please do

[Castillo]

Why wouldn't his example work?

[John Smith]

It just didnt work in runcode.

I couldnt use

if variable == v then table.remove(table,i) end

I wouldnt need to use something like this instead to delete something

if variable == v[somenumber][anothernumber] then ...