Question

5.4 - String Manipulation

This library provides generic functions for string manipulation,
such as finding and extracting substrings, and pattern matching.
When indexing a string in Lua, the first character is at position 1
(not at 0, as in C).
Indices are allowed to be negative and are interpreted as indexing backwards,
from the end of the string.
Thus, the last character is at position -1, and so on.

The string library provides all its functions inside the table
string.
It also sets a metatable for strings
where the __index field points to the string table.
Therefore, you can use the string functions in object-oriented style.
For instance, string.byte(s, i)
can be written as s:byte(i).