Large Meta-Table Serialization

[CanadianGamer]

So I'm making a game that requires a fairly sizeable meta table to store game information in this meta table has arrays in it which also have more meta tables and integers etc. My question is how to serialize this. I've tried googling and searching the forums but it seems that most serialization libraries don't support meta tables. Any help would be appreciated.

[ivan]

Serialization is usually for data whereas metatables are not data, but moreover define the behavior when accessing and assigning keys in a table.
I think you need to include your code so we can see if what you're doing makes sense.

[CanadianGamer]

I'm not sure I was using the right terminology when I said meta tables but in any case, what I meant was something like this

Code: Select all

table1 = {field1 = 2, field2 = 1}

[MrFariator]

That's just a regular lua table, or perhaps in other words an associative array or dictionary. All tables in lua store data with key/value pairs, and you can read more about it here and here with examples.

As for your question, yes, you can serialize tables fairly easily, for example by using bitser, or just about any other serializer listed here.

You can read what meta tables (and meta methods) actually are from lua docs. For a lot of use cases you could just serialize the actual data in the table, and set the relevant meta tables or methods at run time after the data has been deserialized.

[zorg]

Also, tables in tables are often called nested tables instead.