Passing arguments to LuaLaTeX with LuaSQL [duplicate]

Question

This question already has an answer here:

• Passing parameters to a document 12 answers

I am using LuaLaTeX with LuaSQL and I have two files which are test.tex and test.lua. When I compile with lualatex test.tex, first test.lua is ran and it reads user values from my database for rows where variable id_user = 3. This variable is set inside test.lua.

So currently every compilation returns values for same user, but I would like to pass user ID at compile time as an argument, like:

lualatex test.tex 2399

This would be for user with id_user = 2399. So the problem here is that I have to pass values to lualatex and not lua itself! How can this be done? Can anyone provide a MWE?

Answer 1

Recycled with minor changes from Sharpie's answer to a similar question Passing parameters to a document

Within your lua code, the command line arguments are available in arg. Here, we just print the arguments, but the code does show how do get hold of them.

%argtest.tex
\documentclass{article}

\begin{document}

\noindent Command line arguments: 

  \directlua{
    if arg then
      for i,v in ipairs(arg) do
        if (i > 1) then
            tex.print("\string\\begin{description}")           
            tex.print("\string\\item[" .. i .. "]" .. v)
            tex.print("\string\\end{description}")           
        end
      end
    end
  }

\end{document}

Invoked with

lualatex argtest.tex ham spam jam

you obtain