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I'm trying to debug a Lua module. Here's my test input:

---
function test(frame)
	local t = {}
	t[1] = 2
	return t
end
print(test())
---

This input returns the string "table". This is really unhelpful and very annoying. I want to dump the table. The string "table" provides almost no value to me at all.

It would be very helpful to have a function that can print something similar to this:

---
print_table(t)
t = { 1 = 2 }
---

Looking around the Web, it seems that this is a fairly common issue in Lua:

* http://www.luafaq.org/#T1.15
* http://lua-users.org/wiki/TableSerialization
* http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9168058/lua-beginner-table-dump-to-console

I'd like for there to be a built-in function (similar to print_r or var_dump in PHP or the print statement in Python 2) that allows easy dumping/printing/serialization of a Lua table for debugging purposes.