Inspect contents of Lua table in Neovim

When using Lua inside of Neovim you may need to view the contents of Lua tables, which are a first class data structure in Lua world. Tables in Lua can represent ordinary arrays, lists, symbol tables, sets, records, graphs, trees, etc.

If you try to just print a table directly, you will get the reference address for that table instead of the content, which is not very useful for most debugging purposes:

:lua print(vim.api.nvim_get_mode())
" table: 0x7f5b93e5ff88

To solve this, Neovim provides the vim.inspect function as part of its API. It serializes the content of any Lua object into a human readable string.

For example you can get information about the current mode like so:

:lua print(vim.inspect(vim.api.nvim_get_mode()))
" {  blocking = false,  mode = "n"}

Or you can inspect the current position of the cursor like so:

:lua print(vim.inspect(vim.api.nvim_win_get_cursor(0)))
" { 13, 29 }

Inspect will also print strings and numbers:

:lua print(vim.inspect(vim.api.nvim_get_current_line()))
" "Inspect will also print strings:"
:lua print(vim.inspect(vim.api.nvim_win_get_width(0)))
" 67

For more information check :h vim.inspect. Happy vimming!