You might want to make a more complicated decision than a simple if statement allows. For example, you may want to do one thing if the length of a string is less than three, but another thing if the length of a string is greater than three AND less than six! This can be achieved with the elseif statement.

An elseif must always follow an if. Syntactically, an elseif statement is followed by a Boolean condition which is then followed by a then/end block. The elseif statement follows the body of the then block of an if statement, but goes before the end statement. The following code demonstrates the syntax of an elseif statement:

print ("Enter your name")
name = io.read()

if #name <= 3 then
    print ("that's a short name, " .. name)
elseif #name <= 6 then
    print (name .. " is an average length name")
end

You can add as many elseif statements to one if statement as you want. The following code example demonstrates this:

print ("Enter a number")
x = io.read()

if x == "0" then
    print ("input is 0!")
elseif x == "1" then
    print ("input is 1!")
elseif x == "2" then
    print ("input is 2!")
elseif x == "3" then
    print ("input is 3!")
end