Accessing the key in the value (right side) of a table key affectation in Lua

Question

The goal is to match a key of a table with a value depending of the key.

example = { ["dummy"] = this .. " example" }
print example.dummy -- print "dummy example"

Where this is the keyword to refer to the key. Is there any way to do that in Lua?

Answer 1

There is no way to do this directly.

You could do some preprocessing:

example = { ["dummy"] = "{THIS} example" }
for k,v in pairs(example) do
    example[k]=v:gsub("{THIS}",k)
end
print(example.dummy)