Accessing with Dot Notation

Lua offers a more convenient alternative called dot notation. This is a cleaner, more readable way to access values when your keys are simple strings.

Instead of writing player["score"], you can simply write player.score:

local player = {
    ["name"] = "Alex",
    ["score"] = 1500,
    ["level"] = 8
}

print(player.name)   -- outputs: Alex
print(player.score)  -- outputs: 1500

Dot notation is what programmers call "syntactic sugar" - it's a more pleasant way to write the same thing. However, it only works when your key is a valid Lua identifier, meaning it contains only letters, numbers, and underscores, and doesn't start with a number.

local book = {
    ["title"] = "Lua Programming",
    ["pages"] = 300
}

local bookTitle = book.title
print(bookTitle)  -- outputs: Lua Programming