Truthy and Falsy Values

When using logical operators like and, or, and not, Lua needs to determine what counts as "true" or "false" in logical contexts. This concept is called truthy and falsy values, and Lua handles it differently from many other programming languages.

In Lua, only two values are considered falsy (treated as false in logical operations):

print(false and "This won't print")  -- false is falsy
print(nil and "This won't print")    -- nil is falsy

Everything else in Lua is considered truthy (treated as true in logical operations). This includes values that might surprise you if you're coming from other languages:

print(0 and "This will print")      -- 0 is truthy in Lua!
print("" and "This will print")     -- Empty string is truthy!
print({} and "This will print")     -- Empty table is truthy!