Manual:Coding conventions/Lua

Whitespace

 * 1) Use tabs for indentation.  Previously we used 4 spaces, but we have now switched to tabs after the default behaviour of Wikipedia's code editor changed.
 * 2) Try to limit the length of a single line, so people with smaller monitors can read the code easily.
 * 3) Avoid extraneous whitespace when calling a function or subscripting an array or dictionary.  No spaces should be used immediately before or inside a bracketing character (  and their matches).

Control flow
Putting multiple statements on one line is discouraged, unless the expression is very short. Try to avoid this with multi-clause statements, too.

If a single line would be too long, you can split a large statement over multiple lines with a hanging indent that aligns with the opening delimiter. For statements, the conditions should be placed on the next line.

Naming conventions
Define the entry method as simply unpacking the parameters from the frame, and then passing those through a function with the same name prefixed with a single underscore. This can be disregarded if the function is only useful from wikitext, or if it needs a frame for something other than its arguments.

In the standard library, function names consisting of multiple words are simply put together (e.g. ). Note that camelCase is the preferred way to name functions, in order to avoid potential garden-path function names.

Highlighting Lua code
Outside of a module (like on talkpages), code highlighting can be added using the &lt;syntaxhighlight> tag with the attribute :

Produces :