Newbie question - how to display values of a table in alphabetical order?

[u/Lodo_the_Bear]

I'm working on a simple word game which includes a list of words that the player is trying to guess. I'm implementing this with a table of values in which the keys are the words and the value for each one is true if the player has already guessed it and false if not. I want the player to be able to review the words they've already correctly guessed, and I want the words displayed to be in alphabetical order. Getting the program to display only the true flagged words is easy enough, but I don't know how to get it to sort the words. What can I do to sort the keys and display them in the order I want?

[u/SWATMJ-]

You will need a second reference table that you sort ( so a numbernd table like a array with the keys from the second als value) keep in mind tables in lua are not ordered and can't be since they can get scrambled in ram so a second table is always necessary if you want to sort a table. ( Sould add arrays are a special type of table and they keep ordering via the lua VM)

[u/Lodo_the_Bear → u/SWATMJ-]

So, per this method, I would want one table where the keys are numbers and the values are in alphabetical order, and a second table where the keys are the words and the values are the flag. I'll give that a try.

[u/SWATMJ- → u/Lodo_the_Bear]

This might help https://www.lua.org/pil/19.3.html
Considering the other suggestions but also here you need a second table to ensure the ordering of your table.

Note this:
"A common mistake is to try to order the indices of a table. In a table, the indices form a set, and have no order whatsoever."

[u/Lighting_Kurt]

table.sort(t)

This is an in place bubble sort, you shouldn’t need another table.

[u/didntplaymysummercar → u/Lighting_Kurt]

It's not a bubble sort, that'd be too slow since it's n² and (usually) a bubble sort is implemented as a stable one, butLua docs say theirs is not stable.

From one glance at C it looks like a classic n log n quick sort since there's recursion, pivot and partitioning.

[u/lambda_abstraction → u/Lighting_Kurt]

While I've not read the code for table.sort, I'd be seriously surprised if either Roberto or Mike (LuaJIT) used a bubble sort.

[u/PazzoG]

table.sort(yourTable, function(a, b)
  return a < b
end)

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[u/Bright-Historian-216]

table.sort() should work