Lua Strings

I had to work with strings in Lua today, and found that there was some significant differences between 5.0 and 5.1.

The Lua Wiki was quite helpful, except I found one code snibbet which didn't work for me, it was missing "then" at the end of line two in after the if statement:

function url_encode(str)
  if (str) then
    str = string.gsub (str, "\n", "\r\n")
    str = string.gsub (str, "([^%w ])",
        function (c) return string.format ("%%%02X", string.byte(c)) end)
    str = string.gsub (str, " ", "+")
  end
  return str
end

local hi = url_encode("blah")

print(hi)