spew

Spew Module Example

This example demonstrates the spew module for debugging and pretty-printing Lua data structures with colored JSON output.

Features

The spew module provides:

• spew.dump(value) - Pretty-prints any Lua value as colored JSON to stdout
• spew.sdump(value) - Returns a JSON string representation of any Lua value

Running the Example

From the example/spew directory:

cd example/spew
go run .

Or from the repository root:

go run ./example/spew

What the Demo Shows

The demo script (demo.lua) demonstrates:

1. Simple objects - Basic key-value tables
2. Nested structures - Deeply nested tables with multiple levels
3. Arrays - Lua tables as arrays
4. Array of objects - Tables containing multiple structured objects
5. Complex nested structures - Real-world API response-like data
6. String output - Using sdump() to get JSON as a string

Use Cases

The spew module is perfect for:

• Debugging Lua scripts - Quickly inspect table contents
• Testing - Verify data structures in tests
• Logging - Output structured data in readable format
• Development - Understand complex nested data structures

Example Output

The output uses colored JSON with syntax highlighting for:

• Keys (field names)
• Strings (green)
• Numbers (cyan)
• Booleans (yellow)
• Null values (gray)

Perfect for terminal-based development and debugging workflows.