Doing interesting things with code usually requires some kind of input from a user. Input from the console can be obtained with the io.read() function. Unlike the functions used previously, nothing goes inside the parentheses of this one. The function will read one line of input from the user when the user presses Enter. The function returns this line of text as a string, which can be stored in a variable. The following example demonstrates this:

print ("Please enter your name:")
name = io.read()
print ("Hello " .. name)