Messy Tables: Better way?

Garry's Mod coding
#1

Alright, I’m reading data from a text file and converting to tables and data. It’s becoming too complicated and need help simplifying. I’ve been using string.Explode() thus far and it’s getting a bit too confusing.

Here’s an example text file:



"Main";"Title"="123","Title2"="345"-
"Main2";"LOL"="012","LOL2"="333"-
"Main3";"whatever"="01","whatever2"="93"

Here’s how this is formatted:
[ul]
[li]The “;” separates the Main from the data.
[/li][li]The “=” separates the Title from the number data.
[/li][li]The “,” separates the Titles/Number data from one another.
[/li][li]The “-” separates the Mains from one another.
[/li][/ul]
Here’s how I want it to turn out:
[lua]
mytable[“Stuff”][“Main”].Data[“Title”] = “123”
mytable[“Stuff”][“Main”].Data[“Title2”] = “345”

mytable[“Stuff”][“Main2”].Data[“LOL”] = “012”
mytable[“Stuff”][“Main2”].Data[“LOL2”] = “333”

mytable[“Stuff”][“Main3”].Data[“whatever”] = “01”
mytable[“Stuff”][“Main3”].Data[“whatever2”] = “93”
[/lua]
You get the idea.

The thing is that I want to be able to access the “Main”, “Title”, and Number data when it’s all said and done with. I don’t even want to show my code because it’s an utter mess at this point. I either need someone to show me how to do this right, or show me a better way of doing it all together.

#2

Try this:

Text file:




Main|Title|123|Title2|345
Main2|LOL|012|LOL2|333
Main3|whatever|01|whatever2|93

Script:



for k , v in pairs(string.Explode("
" , file.Read("Myfile.txt")) do
	sExp = string.Explode("|" , v)
	MyTable[sExp[1]].sExp[2][sExp[3]] = sExp[4]
end

I’m not too sure if that is what you want, but it should work.

#3

Sorta, but the problem is that “Title” needs to correspond to “123”, and “Title2” needs to correspond to “345”.

[editline]02:41PM[/editline]

The thing is that there could be a Title3 and a 678 number after that. It needs to be flexible.

#4 

for k , v in pairs(string.Explode("
" , file.Read("Myfile.txt")) do
	sExp = string.Explode("|" , v)
	MyTable[sExp[1]].sExp[2] = sExp[3]
	MyTable[sExp[1]].sExp[4] = sExp[5]
end
#5 

file.Write("data.txt",glon.encode(mytable))
local newtable = glon.decode(file.Read("data.txt"))

What’s wrong with that?

#6

You don’t get it. I plan to change the text files regularly, and need it to be flexible enough so I don’t need to change all the numbers in the code. For example, if I added a Title4 and Title5 along with their numbers, I’d need to write 4 more lines of code. I need this to be modular. The code should not have to depend on the text.

[editline]02:48PM[/editline]

Because I’m not creating the text file values in lua. Besides that’s not the problem.