FolderEncoder

FolderEncoder is a robust and lightweight way to represent Roblox Folder instances into lua tables and vice versa.

Easily converts folders into tables and tables into folders. Supports attributes, subfolders, and non-folder instance types.

• Limitations
• Installation

Methods

FolderToTable()

Encode a Folder or ValueBase into a table. Encodes all descendants of dataFile as long as they are Folders or ValueBases. Attributes are prefixed with __attr/.

Parameters

dataFile	Folder | ValueBase	Data file to be encoded

Code Samples

Suppose we wanted to encode the following Folder, where ExampleDataFile has an attribute named Attribute and CFrameValue has an attribute named ColorName

local tbl = FolderEncoder.FolderToTable(ExampleDataFile)

print(tbl)
--[[
	{
		InnerFolder = {
			BrickColorValue = {
				CFrameValue = CFrame.new(),
				__value = BrickColor.new("Medium stone grey"),
				__attr/ColorName = "Grey",
			},
			ObjectValue = <Instance>,
		},
		IntValue = 100,
		StringValue = "Hello World!",
		__attr/Attribute = Vector3.new(1, 2, 3),
	}
]]

TableToFolder()

Converts a table into a folder. If a key in the table is prefixed by attr_, then an attribute will be set to the parent Instance. If the key __value is present in a table then the parent instance will be a ValueBase with that value. If a variable that isn't a table is given, a ValueBase will be created instead using GetValueBase()

data	table | any	Folder or variation to be encoded into a folder
folderName	string?	(Optional) Name of the encoded folder. Default: Folder
folderParent	Instance?	(Optional) Parent of the folder. Default: nil

Code Samples

The code below will effectively clone ExampleDataFile as a new folder CopyOfDataFile in the workspace.

local tbl = FolderEncoder.FolderToTable(ExampleDataFile)

local folder = FolderEncoder.TableToFolder(tbl, "CopyOfDataFile", workspace)

GetValueBase()

var	any	Variable to get ValueBase of

Code Samples

local valueBase = FolderEncoder.GetValueBase(3.14)
print(valueBase) --> <Value>
print(valueBase.Value) --> 3.14
print(valueBase:IsA("NumberValue")) --> true

Limitations

• FolderToTable does not encode instance properties, except for ValueBase values
• FolderToTable will convert keys to a number if possible. This allows the encoding of arrays, but may cause issues in edge cases where numeric keys should be represented as strings
• Since Lua has no formal integers, all numbers encoded by TableToFolder will be represented by a NumberValue instead of an IntValue, even if the number is a whole number

Installation

• Get the model on Roblox
• or Download from the latest release