Love Data

When to use this skill

Provides functionality for creating and transforming data. Use this skill when working with data operations, encoding/decoding, compression, data transformation, or any data-related operations in LÖVE games.

Common use cases

• Encoding and decoding data formats
• Compressing and decompressing data
• Working with binary data and byte arrays
• Performing data transformations and conversions
• Handling game save data and serialization

Functions

• love.data.compress - Compresses a string or data using a specific compression algorithm.
  • love.data.compress(container: ContainerType, format: CompressedDataFormat, rawstring: string, level: number) -> compressedData: CompressedData or string: No description
  • love.data.compress(container: ContainerType, format: CompressedDataFormat, data: Data, level: number) -> compressedData: CompressedData or string: No description
• love.data.decode - Decode Data or a string from any of the EncodeFormats to Data or string.
  • love.data.decode(container: ContainerType, format: EncodeFormat, sourceString: string) -> decoded: ByteData or string: No description
  • love.data.decode(container: ContainerType, format: EncodeFormat, sourceData: Data) -> decoded: ByteData or string: No description
• love.data.decompress - Decompresses a CompressedData or previously compressed string or Data object.
  • love.data.decompress(container: ContainerType, compressedData: CompressedData) -> decompressedData: Data or string: No description
  • love.data.decompress(container: ContainerType, format: CompressedDataFormat, compressedString: string) -> decompressedData: Data or string: No description
  • love.data.decompress(container: ContainerType, format: CompressedDataFormat, data: Data) -> decompressedData: Data or string: No description
• love.data.encode - Encode Data or a string to a Data or string in one of the EncodeFormats.
  • love.data.encode(container: ContainerType, format: EncodeFormat, sourceString: string, linelength: number) -> encoded: ByteData or string: No description
  • love.data.encode(container: ContainerType, format: EncodeFormat, sourceData: Data, linelength: number) -> encoded: ByteData or string: No description
• love.data.getPackedSize(format: string) -> size: number: Gets the size in bytes that a given format used with love.data.pack will use. This function behaves the same as Lua 5.3's string.packsize.
• love.data.hash - Compute the message digest of a string using a specified hash algorithm.
  • love.data.hash(hashFunction: HashFunction, string: string) -> rawdigest: string: No description
  • love.data.hash(hashFunction: HashFunction, data: Data) -> rawdigest: string: To return the hex string representation of the hash, use love.data.encode hexDigestString = love.data.encode('string', 'hex', love.data.hash(algo, data))
• love.data.newByteData - Creates a new Data object containing arbitrary bytes. Data:getPointer along with LuaJIT's FFI can be used to manipulate the contents of the ByteData object after it has been created.
  • love.data.newByteData(datastring: string) -> bytedata: ByteData: Creates a new ByteData by copying the contents of the specified string.
  • love.data.newByteData(Data: Data, offset: number, size: number) -> bytedata: ByteData: Creates a new ByteData by copying from an existing Data object.
  • love.data.newByteData(size: number) -> bytedata: ByteData: Creates a new empty ByteData with the specific size.
• love.data.newDataView(data: Data, offset: number, size: number) -> view: Data: Creates a new Data referencing a subsection of an existing Data object.
• love.data.pack(container: ContainerType, format: string, v1: number or boolean or string, ...: number or boolean or string) -> data: Data or string: Packs (serializes) simple Lua values. This function behaves the same as Lua 5.3's string.pack.
• love.data.unpack - Unpacks (deserializes) a byte-string or Data into simple Lua values. This function behaves the same as Lua 5.3's string.unpack.
  • love.data.unpack(format: string, datastring: string, pos: number) -> v1: number or boolean or string, ...: number or boolean or string, index: number: No description
  • love.data.unpack(format: string, data: Data, pos: number) -> v1: number or boolean or string, ...: number or boolean or string, index: number: Unpacking integers with values greater than 2^52 is not supported, as Lua 5.1 cannot represent those values in its number type.

Types

• ByteData: Data object containing arbitrary bytes in an contiguous memory. There are currently no LÖVE functions provided for manipulating the contents of a ByteData, but Data:getPointer can be used with LuaJIT's FFI to access and write to the contents directly.

• CompressedData: Represents byte data compressed using a specific algorithm. love.data.decompress can be used to de-compress the data (or love.math.decompress in 0.10.2 or earlier).

  • love.CompressedData.getFormat() -> format: CompressedDataFormat: Gets the compression format of the CompressedData.

Enums

• CompressedDataFormat: Compressed data formats.

  • lz4: The LZ4 compression format. Compresses and decompresses very quickly, but the compression ratio is not the best. LZ4-HC is used when compression level 9 is specified. Some benchmarks are available here.
  • zlib: The zlib format is DEFLATE-compressed data with a small bit of header data. Compresses relatively slowly and decompresses moderately quickly, and has a decent compression ratio.
  • gzip: The gzip format is DEFLATE-compressed data with a slightly larger header than zlib. Since it uses DEFLATE it has the same compression characteristics as the zlib format.
  • deflate: Raw DEFLATE-compressed data (no header).

• ContainerType: Return type of various data-returning functions.

  • data: Return type is ByteData.
  • string: Return type is string.

• EncodeFormat: Encoding format used to encode or decode data.

  • base64: Encode/decode data as base64 binary-to-text encoding.
  • hex: Encode/decode data as hexadecimal string.

• HashFunction: Hash algorithm of love.data.hash.

  • md5: MD5 hash algorithm (16 bytes).
  • sha1: SHA1 hash algorithm (20 bytes).
  • sha224: SHA2 hash algorithm with message digest size of 224 bits (28 bytes).
  • sha256: SHA2 hash algorithm with message digest size of 256 bits (32 bytes).
  • sha384: SHA2 hash algorithm with message digest size of 384 bits (48 bytes).
  • sha512: SHA2 hash algorithm with message digest size of 512 bits (64 bytes).

Examples

Data encoding

-- Encode data to base64
local originalData = "Hello World!"
local encoded = love.data.encode("string", "base64", originalData)
print(encoded)

-- Decode base64 data
local decoded = love.data.decode("string", "base64", encoded)
print(decoded)  -- "Hello World!"

Data compression

-- Compress game data
local gameData = serializeGameState()
local compressed = love.data.compress("string", "zlib", gameData)

-- Save compressed data
love.filesystem.write("savegame.dat", compressed)

Best practices

• Use appropriate encoding formats for different data types
• Consider compression for large data sets
• Handle data encoding/decoding errors gracefully
• Test data operations on target platforms
• Be mindful of memory usage with large data operations

Platform compatibility

• Desktop (Windows, macOS, Linux): Full data support
• Mobile (iOS, Android): Full support
• Web: Full support