ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

a good example of the talents whose IDs have colons are inscriptions

This makes addon developpings and debuggings involving these talents annoying. i.e. You can safely type game.player.T_RUSH, but something like game.player.T_INFUSION:_REGENERATION_2 is not going to work.

and I see no downsides of this, except for the efforts to do so.

You can bypass it with square brackets instead of the . indexing of tables.

So game.player["T_INFUSION:_REGENERATION_2"] should work.

yeah, this works, but what if I'm trying to build such a table in a data file? Using quotations in key seems not working, neither does using colons of course.

What are you trying to do that isn't working?
There is no reason that syntax would work in one place, but not in another.

I'm trying to write an addon and I want to import a table where some keys are talent IDs from a data file.

plus, when debugging, using [] won't give you auto-complete.

Subtly hinting that you should post the code that isn't working...

helminthauge wrote:I'm trying to write an addon and I want to import a table where some keys are talent IDs from a data file.

The [] syntax can be used in table indexes too. For instance, here's a fragment from a talent point plan vault file generated by (and designed to be reloaded by) my Talent Point Planner addon:

ok, thx Zizzo. seems I'd better actually go to learn Lua