Trouble Serializing a Table for Storage

I've been poking around on the forums here, learning how to serialize variables I'll need to use across sessions. I found an example in another thread which seemed to do exactly what I needed, but I get a runtime error trying to duplicate it.

I created this simple alias to play around with and try and get this to work. Here's the current alias and the error I'm getting.

function setvar()
luaenemies = {billy, bob}
require "serialize"
SetVariable("enemylist", serialize('luaenemies'))
end

And the error...

Run-time error
Plugin: LidSys (called from world: Achaea)
Function/Sub: setvar called by alias
Reason: processing alias ""
...\worlds\plugins\MyAchaea\modules\scripts\enemies.lua:26: attempt to call global 'serialize' (a table value)
stack traceback:
...\worlds\plugins\MyAchaea\modules\scripts\enemies.lua:26: in function <...\worlds\plugins\MyAchaea\modules\scripts\enemies.lua:21>

Any ideas why this won't work for me?

Your quotes are all in funky places, unless "billy" and "bob" are variables and not strings, and "luaenemies" is a string and not a variable.

You actually need to call something in the serialize table. Try this:



This calls "save_simple" inside the serialize table, to set the variable (which now looks like this):



And to get it back next time:



That loads the string back into the Lua variable luaenemies.

Finally got it nailed down. Thanks guys, it looks like my quotes were what was really throwing me off. Serialize didn't do quite what I wanted it to, so I ended up doing a SetVariable with a table.concat and pipes to get it lined up.