Board Thread:Lua Help/@comment-131168-20141029004938

I'm working on a module where a string pattern is provided as an argument, and it replaces certain text with newly calculated info. Base cases work fine. I then moved to testing patterns with arbitrary fancier looks. As one test I used an HTML table with a gradient as a background, like

and got nothing. I further tested simply having a function that returned whatever was given as the first argument, and still the above returned nothing. For a long time I was looking for a solution based on the theory that the table was being processed before anything could get sent, but with further testing I think the problem is that it's assuming everything to the right of the = is the string that should be assigned to an argument named everything to the left of the =.

I got a working result by replacing = with EQUALS and having the function change it back, but is there a less goofy workaround? 