how to delete all elements in a Lua table?

Question

How do I delete all elements inside a Lua table? I don\'t want to do:

t = {}
table.insert(t, 1)
t = {}  -- this assigns a new pointer to t

I w

Answer 1

For a faster version that ignores the __pairs metamethod:

local next = next
local k = next(tab)
while k ~= nil do
  tab[k] = nil
  k = next(tab, k)
end

EDIT: As @siffiejoe mentions in the comments, this can be simplified back into a for loop by replacing the pairs call with its default return value for tables: the next method and the table itself. Additionally, to avoid all metamethods, use the rawset method for table index assignment:

for k in next, tab do rawset(tab, k, nil) end