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Regular expressions (or regex) are a common and very versatile programming technique for manipulating strings. On Wikipedia you can use a limited version of regex called a Lua pattern to select and modify bits of text from a string. The pattern is a piece of code describing what you are looking for in the string.
The string-search functions in Lua script can run extremely fast, comparing millions of characters per second. For example, a search of a 40,000-character article text, for 99 separate words (passed as 99 parameters in a template), ran within one second of Lua CPU clock time.
This template removes the first word of the first parameter. Use |1= for the first parameter if the string may contain an equals sign (=). By default, words are delimited by spaces, but the optional parameter |sep= can set the separator to any character.
Note: Lua patterns are not regular expressions in the traditional POSIX sense, and they are not even a subset of regular expressions. But they share many constructs with regular expressions (more below). Lua patterns are used to define, find and handle a pattern in a string. It can do the common search and replace action in a text, but it has ...
This becomes a problem when you have 6 tabs or 24 spaces, what could be small on a notepad gets exploded on wikipedia. While yes I do use tabs outside wiki spaces are prefered on wiki, unless the css for lua code is changed kind of like how a .css pages on wiki are treated with a line number and proper tabing, I would say spacing is prefered..
This template trims leading and trailing (but not interior) whitespace from a string. The string should be passed as the first unnamed parameter. The parameter must be named |1= if its value contains a = character. You may substitute this template—that is, if this template is used as {}, the resulting wikicode is "clean".
This help-page, Help:Lua debugging, explains issues of writing Lua script and debugging the source code, to remove errors or improve performance. Because Lua is a "semi-compiled" interpreted language, it does not prescreen for all common syntax errors, nor detect misspelled variables, which are only found at runtime when seeing the " Script ...
Also, if the table has cell spacing (and thus border-collapse=separate), meaning that cells have separate borders with a gap in between, that gap will still be visible. A cruder way to align columns of numbers is to use a figure space   or  , which is intended to be the width of a numeral, though is font-dependent in practice: