Help with require()

[jag_e_nummer_ett]

I was looking around in Lua.org's "Programming in Lua" and they showed that if you require a file you get a variable named _REQUIREDNAME
http://www.lua.org/pil/15.3.html

I tested with LÖVE 0.9 and it didn't work, no _REQUIREDNAME.
I bet LÖVE got its own custom require function but could they include this in an update?

[bartbes]

The PiL is sadly outdated, the module name gets passed as first vararg.

[jag_e_nummer_ett]

The PiL is sadly outdated, the module name gets passed as first vararg.

So like this?

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args = {...}
name = args[1]

or 

name = ...

Yea that worked. The more you know...

[Simon6689]

I need some help with require() too.
How do you require something twice?

[jag_e_nummer_ett]

I need some help with require() too.
How do you require something twice?

At the site I posted in the main post content it says this "Remember that require avoids loading the same package multiple times."

So what you can do, if your file returns an object at the end you can save it twice. Example:

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-- file: myfile.lua
class = {}
class.num = math.random(255)

function class.test()
    print(class.num)
end

return class

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-- file: main.lua
one = require "myfile"
two = require "myfile"

function love.load()
    one.test()
    two.test()
end

I do not know if that works, cant test it atm, but if that doesnt then have some function in it like class.new() or something

[Simon6689]

It's not just two times, I need something that would re-run the file several times.
I have also tried using

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loadfile "name.lua"

but that only works if I paste in the absolute path of main.lua's directory like:

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loadfile("C:\\Users\\Simon\\Documents\\GitHub\\Game\\Game\\objects\\"..name..".lua")

which wont't work if I pack it into a .love, move it out of my documents or another person uses it.
Is there a way to get the path that main.lua is in?

[slime]

You should use [wiki]love.filesystem.load[/wiki] if you want to load and run a Lua file multiple times.

However, there aren't many reasons to do that (aside from hot reloading of Lua tables or something) - if you actually just want to execute code in your Lua file multiple times, you should turn the code into a function and call the function multiple times instead.

[Roland_Yonaba]

It's not just two times, I need something that would re-run the file several times.

You can go ahead with The Great Slime's suggestion.
I'll throw this function:

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local function rrequire(modname) return love.filesystem.load(modname..'.lua')() end

Or indeed, you can alter package.loaded.
See, when you include some file via require, it caches the file content into a table named package.loaded.
In case you call the same file again, require would just lookup into that table and return the cached entry if found.
So, in terms of code, it would be as simple as:

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require 'somefile'
-- some code
package.loaded.somefile = nil -- or package.loaded['somefile'] = nil
require 'somefile'

Or you can wrap it into a function:

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local function rrequire(modname)
  package.loaded[modname] = nil
  return require(modname)
end

Hope this helps.

[Robin]

Follow slime's suggestion. It's not hacky at all, unlike any other way of doing it.

I'll show it using jag_e_nummer_ett's example code:

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-- file: myfile.lua
local class = {} --also: should be local not global

function class.init()
    class.num = math.random(255)
end

function class.test()
    print(class.num)
end

return class

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-- file: main.lua
local one = require "myfile" --also local

function love.load()
    one.init()
    one.test()
    one.init()
    one.test()
end