Lua Quick Start Guide

Working with time

The first function to know when working with time is os.clock. This function returns the number of seconds that have elapsed since the Lua program started running. Code tends to run pretty fast, but the following code should print out two different time stamps:

print ("Time: " .. os.clock())for i=1,1000,1 do  -- Just spinendprint ("Time: " .. os.clock())

Seconds is a very granular measure of time. os.date can be used to retrieve less-granular bits of time. This function takes a format string as an argument, and returns the formatted time as a string.

The arguments for os.date are the same as the arguments for the strftime function in C. A full list of arguments is online here: http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/ctime/strftime/ ...