Reading from a txt file and turning it into a table

[0x13f]

I am working on a custom gamemode which currently contains 2 entities: lumrace_lum and lumrace_item.
In order for the gamemode to be playable there needs to be spawn locations for these entities.
I wrote a system that allows the gamemode to read these spawn locations from a txt file, much like ttt.

item 432 432 64
item -432 -432 64
item 432 -432 64
item -432 432 64
lum 0 0 32
lum 0 0 256

This file is called lr_test_lumrace.txt, and it contains all of the spawn locations for the map lr_test.
The first value is the entity, which is either 'item' or 'lum', the other 3 values are the x, y and z coordinates.

if not file.Exists("maps/"..game:GetMap().."_lumrace.txt","GAME") then
	error("Current map does not have an entity placement file associated with it.\n'maps/"..game:GetMap()..".txt' does not exist")
end

local a = file.Read("maps/"..game:GetMap().."_lumrace.txt", "GAME")
a = devideString(a,"\n")

for i,v in ipairs(a) do
	local b = devideString(a," ")
	if b[1] == "item" then
		table.insert(lumrace_spawn_item,{b[2],b[3],b[4]})
	elseif b[1] == "lum" then
		table.insert(lumrace_spawn_lum,{b[2],b[3],b[4]})
	else
		print("Unknown lumrace entity spawn: '"..b[1].."' ("..game:GetMap().."_lumrace.txt)")
	end
end

This piece of code is located in init.lua and takes the info found the txt file and puts it in 2 tables: lumrace_spawn_item and lumrace_spawn_lum.

function devideString(text,devideChar,skipEnter)
	
	local output = {}
	local bookmark = 1
	skipEnter = skipEnter or false
	output[1] = ""
	
	for i=1,string.len(text) do
	
		if text:sub(i,i) == devideChar then
			bookmark = bookmark + 1
			output[bookmark] = ""
		elseif skipEnter and text:sub(i,i+1) == "\n" then
			
		else
			output[bookmark] = output[bookmark]..text:sub(i,i)
		end
	end
	
	return output

end

This is the 'devideString' function which is located in shared.lua.
I wrote this a while back for general usage in lua, so I'm assuming it should work for gmod as well.

But when I try to run this code, I get the following error message:

[ERROR] gamemodes/lumrace/gamemode/shared.lua:21: bad argument #1 to 'len' (string expected, got table)
  1. len - [C]:-1
   2. devideString - gamemodes/lumrace/gamemode/shared.lua:21
    3. unknown - gamemodes/lumrace/gamemode/init.lua:15

This is because for some reason the argument 'text' is a table instead of a string, but I can't find out why this happens.
If anyone could help me understand why this happens and/or how I can fix it, that would be awesome.
Thanks

[PvM_Marcus]

[url]http://wiki.garrysmod.com/page/string/Explode[/url]

[pervert]

[QUOTE=PvM_marcus;50656404][url]http://wiki.garrysmod.com/page/string/Explode[/url][/QUOTE]

or

[URL="http://wiki.garrysmod.com/page/table/ToString"]http://wiki.garrysmod.com/page/table/ToString[/URL]

[0x13f]

So I found the problem:
in this chunk of code:

for i,v in ipairs(a) do
	local b = devideString(a," ")
	if b[1] == "item" then
[...]

I was trying to devide each line individually, but the code was trying to devide the entire table.
So to fix this I simply had to change

devideString(a," ")

to

devideString(a[1]," ")

Still, thanks for telling me about string.Explode and table.ToString!