In Lua, does indexing a table with a table as the key call the __eq metamethod?

Question

I am wondering if table[key] where key is a table with a metatable will call the __eq metamethod. For instance, if the table has a key "a" and the __eq metamethod returns true if "a" is being compared to the metatable, will indexing the table with the table return the value for "a"?

Answer 1

No, indexing uses raw equality: http://www.lua.org/manual/5.2/manual.html#2.4

You should consider explicitly converting your objects to their string representation before indexing instead of relying on implicit metamethods.