Looking for Lua idioms

Purpose: I started this page because there are things which I have not yet figured out how to do, or do well, in Lua --jcw

Tcl's "regexp": in Tcl, one can use regular expressions to disect a string into several components and place the results in variables, like so:

    regexp {^http://([^/])(.*)$} http://site.com/path/to/file - site path

The result is sort of like doing

    site, path = 'site.com', '/path/to/file'

What's the way to do this in Lua without having to write code that sets up a table, then gsub into a function with an upvalue and two assignments?

Try this:

    x, x, site, path = strfind(url, "^http://([^/]*)(.*)$")

--John