How to string.find the square bracket character in lua?

Question

So I\'m trying to find square brackets inside a string:

s = \"testing [something] something else\"
x,y = string.find(s,\"[\")

which gives me an

Answer 1

Use the fourth argument to string.find, which turns off pattern-matching.

x, y = string.find(s, "[", nil, true)

Answer 2

John's answer will work -- turning off pattern matching.

What you're trying to do -- escape the [ -- is done with the % character in Lua:

 x,y = string.find(s,'%[')

Also strings in Lua all have the string module as their metatable, so you could just say:

 x,y = s:find('%[')

or even:

 x,y = s:find'%['