How do you copy a Lua table by value?

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Table copy has many potential definitions. It depends on whether you want simple or deep copy, whether you want to copy, share or ignore metatables, etc. There is no single implementation that could satisfy everybody.

One approach is to simply create a new table and duplicate all key/value pairs:

function table.shallow_copy(t)
  local t2 = {}
  for k,v in pairs(t) do
    t2[k] = v
  end
  return t2
end

copy = table.shallow_copy(a)

Note that you should use pairs instead of ipairs, since ipairs only iterate over a subset of the table keys (ie. consecutive positive integer keys starting at one in increasing order).

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