Nested tables and numerical keys in Lua

Question

I'm not sure if this is possible due to the numerical indices, but hopefully someone can point me in the right direction.

Given the table of:

t = { 13, 200, 12, 15, 23 }

how can I nest a table using the numbers?

t["200"] = {"stuff", "more stuff", "even more stuff"}

doesn't seem to work, as it'll create a position 200 and fill in the empty cells with null. I'd add a letter as a suffix/prefix, but the problem comes trying to sort the table numerically. Is this even possible, or am I stuck with a different method? Thanks!

Slight edit due to a realisation:

t["200"] = {"stuff", "more stuff", "even more stuff"}

actually creates a key of "200", whereas:

t[200] = {"stuff", "more stuff", "even more stuff"}

creates the index 200 with everything else null.

Answer 1

Perhaps it helps to view your assignment like this:

t = { [1] = 13, [2] = 200, [3] = 12, [4] = 15, [5] = 23 }

To change what is currently 200 (namely t[2]), you do:

t[2] = {"stuff", "more stuff", "even more stuff"}

Edit: that results in your table looking like this:

t = { [1] = 13, [2] = {"stuff", "more stuff", "even more stuff"}, [3] = 12, [4] = 15, [5] = 23 }
-- or, equivalent::
t = { 13, {"stuff", "more stuff", "even more stuff"}, 12, 15, 23 }

Answer 2

The trouble is your use of "". Your table t contains a bunch of numbers, and you're entering a string as the key. You want to iterate over the table and do... something that you didn't particularly well define. However, you can't add to a table whilst iterating over it, so you might have to do some funny stuff.

t = { 13, 200, 12, 15, 23 }
newt = {};
for key, value in pairs(t) {
    newt[value] = { }; 
}

This will create a table entry in newt, where the key is a value in the table t, for all values in t.