Finds the first occurrence of the pattern in the string passed. If an instance of the pattern is found, a pair of values representing the start and the end of the matched string is returned.

Syntax

int,​ int utf8.find ( string input, string pattern, [ int startpos = 1, boolean plain = false ] )

Required Arguments

• input: A string character sequence.
• pattern: A string match pattern (you can disable pattern matching by using the optional fourth argument plain ).

Optional Arguments

NOTE: When using optional arguments, you might need to supply all arguments before the one you wish to use.

• startpos (default: 1): An integer representing the beginning position.
• plain (default: false): A boolean, if pattern matching should be turned off

Returns

• int: start position
• int: end position

Returns two number values for the beginning and ending position of the matched string, nil otherwise.

Code Examples

shared

This example shows how to search for parts of a string.

print(utf8.find("Hello MTA User", "User")) -- 11, 14
print(utf8.find("Hello MTA User", "e")) -- 2, 2
print(utf8.find("Hello MTA User", "e", 3)) -- 13, 13
print(utf8.find("Привет Привет", "%s")) -- 7, 7
print(utf8.find("Привет Привет", "%s", 1, true)) -- nil

-- Comparsion of utf8.find and string.find
local startpos, endpos = utf8.find("Привет", "и")
print(startpos, endpos) -- 3, 3

local startpos, endpos = string.find("Привет", "и")
print(startpos, endpos) -- 5, 6

See Also

UTF8 Library Functions

• utf8.byte
• utf8.char
• utf8.charpos
• utf8.escape
• utf8.find
• utf8.fold
• utf8.gmatch
• utf8.gsub
• utf8.insert
• utf8.len
• utf8.lower
• utf8.match
• utf8.ncasecmp
• utf8.next
• utf8.remove
• utf8.reverse
• utf8.sub
• utf8.title
• utf8.upper
• utf8.width
• utf8.widthindex

Reference

• Scripting Functions