I read the tutorial you linked and I see no difference between Lua patterns and regexes, except that '\' has been replaced with '%', and '*?' with '-'. The only

I read the tutorial you linked and I see no difference between Lua patterns and regexes, except that '\' has been replaced with '%', and '*?' with '-'. The only thing in common with scanf is adopting '%' as control character, otherwise that's the same old regular expressions: '%d' matches just one digit, not whole signed integer like in scanf.