Cant access table entry at index

Question

My local players table uses the PlayerServerId as Index.

When i now want to access the player data at Index 1 (My PlayerServerId) i get nil as a result.

But when i now iterate through the players table and print out the index for the iterations, I get the Index 1 (like how i expect)

Debug Code:

print("PlayerServerId: ".. GetPlayerServerId(PlayerId())) -- --> Output: "PlayerServerId: 1"

print(players[1]) -- --> Output "nil"

for i, player in pairs(players) do
  print("Index: " .. i) -- --> Output: "Index: 1"
end

Output:

How is this possible? What am i doing wrong or what do I oversee?

I tried to debug every single step to make sure the data i want to access is available.

Answer 1

i is probably the string "1".

1 ~= "1" due to things of different types never being equal in Lua. So t[1] can be nil, while t["1"] can be something else.

When you iterate with pairs, you also iterate over string keys. print("Index: " .. i) will then print Index: 1 if i is the string "1". It would also print the same if i was the number 1.

Effectively, your print debugging is flawed, because it performs number to string coercion. To properly debug, you need something that tells you the type as well, for example by quoting strings.

I would recommend using something like inspect.lua or writing your own equivalent. For now, printing type(i) as well should tell you everything you need to know.