[LUA] If string not working

[LordKörtan]

Hello! You might remember me from such classics as 'Asked for help yesterday' and 'guy rips hair out because hes stupid', I've been working on trying to get a IF string work to shorten the name of targets if its too long, but I cannot get it to work and I just can't figure out what I'm doing wrong. I looked online and as far as I can tell, my code looks correct.

function() 
     
    -- Set Level Variables 
    local Level = UnitLevel("target") 
    local Level = "[" .. Level .. "]" 
     
    -- Set Name Variables 
    local Name = GetUnitName("target") 
    local NameL = string.len(Name) 
     
    -- If Name is longer then 12 
    -- cut it off 
    Number = "12" 
    if NameL >= Number then 
        local Name = Name:sub(1,12) .. "..." 
    end 
     
    -- Display 
    local Display = Level .. Name 
    return Display 
     
end  

All this returns is a ? by the way, thanks in advance, again. ._.

[Deleted]

not sure about your if statement right now. But why don't you just return "Name:sub(1,12)". This way you cut it off after the 12 character and as long as the name is shorter the full name is shown or am I missing something?

[LordKörtan]

The code/UI I'm working on is more so me learning LUA and the WOW API than it is just trying to do everything properly. So even if I end up not using the IF statement here, I'll be using it in other places, so I might as well learn why it's not working now.

[papakiller]

I didn't work with the LUA and the WOW API but in your IF statement, you are comparing a string ("12") with a number ("NameL"), and it will not work because it's 2 different type (in other programmation language at least) so if you want to compare string lentgh with a number, NameL is ok (it's a number return by len()), your variable Number should be 12 and not "12". If you want to compare between strings themselves, you have to compare variable with "" (like "Hello" != "allo").

Hope it helps to understand the IF statement.

[Deleted]

snip

Your code has some errors in it, I believe you can change it to this:

function()
    
    -- Set Level Variables
    local Level = "[" .. UnitLevel("target") .. "]"
    
    -- Set Name Variables
    local Name = GetUnitName("target")
    local NameL = string.len(Name)
    
    -- If Name is longer then 12
    -- cut it off
    local Number = 12
    if NameL > Number then
        Name = Name:sub(1,12) .. "..."
    end
    
    -- Display
    local Display = Level .. Name
    return Display
    
end

Number should be an actual integer and not a string because you cant compare a number to a string value if you want the length compared. Also shortened your level variable to a single one and you only need to add local to the first mention of a variable and not every time you use it. It just needs to be initiated as local.

For the if statement you can also remove the = sign because it is not needed as if the name is 12 you dont need to shorten it to 12.

[Odylle]

Lots of code, but I think lots of it is very unnecessary
I think the following just works as well.
If you just always return the first 12 characters of the name, you do exactly what you want? I dont believe you need a IF statement there. Just always return the first 12.

function()
    return string.format("[%s] %s", UnitLevel("target"), GetUnitName("target"):sub(1,12))
end

[LordKörtan]

Appriciate all the help! Thanks guys.