Issues with io.read() in wxLUA (Does not wait for user input, Always returns nil)

Question

I am just getting into Lua, and I am having issues with user input. No matter what I do, io.read() always returns nil.

This is what I have tried, nothing works.

name = io.read()
print(name)

name = io.read(7)
print(name)

print(io.read:())

All of these simply print nil. I think what is happening is name is set to io.read() before the user has the chance to actually enter a value.

This:

 while not name do name = io.read()
 print name

simply causes the program to crash on a sort of short circuit, probably because the loop completes and the app refreshes within a fraction of a second.

I am using the wxLua environment for Windows, in the dialog version these programs run fine, but you obviously cannot do as much with that.

Answer 1

I'm not sure why you are trying io.read(7) (as this would read 7 bytes), but the following script works for me with wxlua (although I use my own compiled wxlua library, which you can get here):

require('wx')
io.write("Enter something: ")
local value = io.read()
io.write(value, "\n")