Can luaL_loadfile() be replaced by luaL_loadbuffer()? - c

Question

I have have a working project like with the following code , running on Visual Studio 2013, windows 7 N.
I tried to replace luaL_loadfile() with luaL_loadbuffer(L,s,strlen(s),name), so that I could put the script as a string together in the main instead, because in my other project with IAR, I have problem with opening file in the project, but I managed to call a lua script directly with putting the script as a string in the main(). My question would be: how does this luaL_loadbuffer() work? I mean, if I understand this function correctly, luaL_loadbuffer(L,s,strlen(s),name), the "s" means a string. I tried to debug with luaL_loadbuffer(), but could not passing the debug, always got error status= 2. Besides I also see somebody else used luaL_loadbuffer() to load the script file, so I am confused now. Can anyone help me?
-- last.lua
function f ()
print("Hello from Lua")
end
#include <lua.h>
#include <lauxlib.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <stdio.h>
int main()
{
double z;
int error;
lua_State *L = luaL_newstate();
luaL_openlibs(L);
if (luaL_loadfile(L, "last.lua") || lua_pcall(L, 0, 0, 0))
{
printf("error: %s", lua_tostring(L, -1));
return -1;
}
lua_getglobal(L, "f");
if (!lua_isfunction(L, -1))
{
lua_pop(L, 1);
return -1;
}
if (lua_pcall(L, 0, 0, 0) != 0)
{
printf("error running function `f': %s\n", lua_tostring(L, -1));
return -1;
}
lua_close(L);
return 0;
}

Answer 1

Yes, you should be able to do this, assuming you load the file as one chunk (and not try to process it by line or by some other chunk as this will probably make those parts invalid Lua code). There is an example in "Programming Lua" that shows how loadbuffer can be used.
Two additional suggestions: (1) don't remove new lines from the file you read and pass it exactly as is to loadbuffer (otherwise --comment\ncode will turn code into comment), (2) make name look like #name as it will make name to be recognized as the file name (for example, in errors thrown from that code). See description under "source" in 4.9.