I am trying to create a Lua program using Sublime and Corona. I want to fetch a webpage, use a pattern to extract certain text from the page, and then save the extracted text into a table. I am using the network.request method provided by Corona
The problem: The extracted text is not saving into the global variable I created. Whenever I try to reference it or print it outside of the function it returns nil. Any ideas why this is happening?
I have attached a screen shot of my event.response output. This is what I want to be saved into my Lua table
Here is my code:
local restaurants = {}
yelpString = ""
--this method tells the program what to do once the website is retrieved
local function networkListener( event )
if ( event.isError ) then
print( "Network error: ", event.response )
else
yelpString = event.response
--loops through the website to find the pattern that extracts
restaurant names and prints it out
for i in string.gmatch(yelpString, "<span >(.-)<") do
table.insert(restaurants, i)
print(i)
end
end
end
-- retrieves the website
network.request( "https://www.yelp.com/search?
cflt=restaurants&find_loc=Cleveland%2C+OH%2C+US", "GET", networkListener )