Literals

All of the primitive literals in Lua can be used. This applies to numbers, strings, booleans, and nil.

Unlike Lua, Line breaks are allowed inside of single and double quote strings without an escape sequence:

some_string = "Here is a string
  that has a line break in it."

-- You can mix expressions into string literals using #{} syntax.
-- String interpolation is only available in double quoted strings.
print "I am #{math.random! * 100}% sure."

some_string = "Here is a string
  that has a line break in it."

-- You can mix expressions into string literals using #{} syntax.
-- String interpolation is only available in double quoted strings.
print "I am #{math.random! * 100}% sure."

Number Literals

You can use underscores in a number literal to increase readability.

integer = 1_000_000
hex = 0xEF_BB_BF
binary = 0B10011

integer = 1_000_000
hex = 0xEF_BB_BF
binary = 0B10011

YAML Multiline String

The | prefix introduces a YAML-style multiline string literal:

str = |
  key: value
  list:
    - item1
    - #{expr}

str = |
  key: value
  list:
    - item1
    - #{expr}

This allows writing structured multiline text conveniently. All line breaks and indentation are preserved relative to the first non-empty line, and expressions inside #{...} are interpolated automatically as tostring(expr).

YAML Multiline String automatically detects the common leading whitespace prefix (minimum indentation across all non-empty lines) and removes it from all lines. This makes it easy to indent your code visually without affecting the resulting string content.

fn = ->
  str = |
    foo:
      bar: baz
  return str

fn = ->
  str = |
    foo:
      bar: baz
  return str

Internal indentation is preserved relative to the removed common prefix, allowing clean nested structures.

All special characters like quotes (") and backslashes (\) in the YAMLMultiline block are automatically escaped so that the generated Lua string is syntactically valid and behaves as expected.

str = |
  path: "C:\Program Files\App"
  note: 'He said: "#{Hello}!"'

str = |
  path: "C:\Program Files\App"
  note: 'He said: "#{Hello}!"'