Table Reference Issue

[hartste90]

Hey smart people -
I have attached my .love file to make my description make sense
I'm a web application developer trying my hand at game development and I stumbled upon the Love Engine for my first go at it! But I'm having some trouble - I'm trying to write a simple typing game (ignore cheezyness please) where words fall and you have to type them correctly before they reach the bottom of the screen.
The words on screen are held in an array - I'm very familiar with arrays but not with Lua. There seems to be an error popping up in the ' keypressed' function.

When the user enters the first letter of one of the activeWords it should look through the array at all the first letters and see if they match - but the errors stops the execution and I cannot figure out how to debug it by printing to the error screen.

-Can anyone tell me how to debug the code (i.e. print to a console or error page)
-See if you can figure out what the error indicates in the code? I've attached my zipped .love file to this post

-Thanks in advance for the help!

[Robin]

-Can anyone tell me how to debug the code (i.e. print to a console or error page)

Start a terminal and run LÖVE from there.

-See if you can figure out what the error indicates in the code? I've attached my zipped .love file to this post

The issue is here:

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			nextLetter = activeWords[i][1];

You see, you try to extract a letter from a string by indexing it. In Lua, a string is not a table, so you should replace it with:

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			nextLetter = activeWords[i]:sub(1,1)

(See string.sub in the Lua manual.)

There are other things in your code: lots of global variables that shouldn't be global (like nextLetter), you use table.getn(), which is deprecated, use the # operator instead:

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for i = 1, #activeWords do

Also, could you please zip the contents of your folder rather than the folder itself? Then you can rename it to a .love and we can run it directly instead of having to extract the contents first.

[Nixola]

Start a terminal and run LÖVE from there.

Unless you're on Windows. In that case, create a file, call it "conf.lua", place it in the same folder as your main.lua and put the following code in it:

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love.conf = function(t)
t.console = true
end

Then, if you want to print something in the console, simply use print(something)

[Robin]

But OP is on a Mac, so that's not relevant for them.