Trying to count prefabs with button

[Fuzzy_Waffle]

Ultimately I want a mod that will allow a user input (either a typed string or a mouse click/hover) to select a prefab and then run the c_countprefabs("prefab") command (or something equivalent) on that.

By hacking together code from some other mods and looking some things up I have something that almost works but doesn't.

My modinfo has only a section defining the key to be pressed which is assignable. The modmain consists of

_G = GLOBAL

local function GetKeyFromConfig(config)
    local key = GetModConfigData(config)
    return key and (type(key) == "number" and key or _G[key])
end

local function InGame()
	return ThePlayer and ThePlayer.HUD and not ThePlayer.HUD:HasInputFocus()
end

--I don't know what this InGame() does but it was part of a mod that I partially copied and I don't know if its okay to remove

_G.TheInput:AddKeyUpHandler(GetKeyFromConfig("pcount"), 
	function ()
		local prefab_str = "tentacle" --prefabstring, at the moment I just pass it explicitly just to try and get something working but eventually I want this to be obtained from some user input
		
--[[		
		local x, y, z = _G.ThePlayer.Transform:GetWorldPosition()
		local tab1 = _G.TheSim:FindEntities(x, y, z, 40, prefab_str, nil, nil)
		local amnt = #tab1
		for k,v in pairs(tab1)
		do
		print(tab1[k])
		end
]] --this was an alternate approach that almost worked. the for loop was to check what the heck was in tab1 since it wasn't what I expected. turns out FindEntities was just finding all the nearby entities instead of the prefab_str one I wanted.
    
    
		local amnt = _G.ThePlayer.consolecommands.c_countprefabs(prefab_str,1) --amount, noprint enabled
        --the game doesn't recognize consolecommands and I don't know enough about how things are set up internally to put the correct path here or if its even possible to run c_countprefabs the way I'm trying to
		
    --local amnt = _G.consolecommands.c_countprefabs(prefab_str,1) --amount, noprint enabled
		
		_G.ThePlayer.components.talker:Say("There are "..tostring(amnt).." "..prefab_str)
end)

Now the alternative approach did get a point where some number was being spat out but it was counting the result of FindEntities and FindEntities was making a table of all nearby entities instead of the ones that match prefab_str which is currently set to a fixed value of tentacle (I want this to be determined by user input eventually). Since FindEntities wasn't working (and since I didn't know which radius was most appropriate) I went back to trying to use c_countprefabs but I don't know how to call it from within a mod correctly. This approach just gives me errors saying that consolecommands isn't a correct reference or table. I tried variations of the path like subbing TheWorld in for ThePlayer.

I don't care which approach gets working but it would useful to know how to call a console command like c_countprefabs because I want to write another mod that does something similar to this but uses c_gonext instead.

Okay I found out that I just need to throw out the whole consolecommands part and just have _G.c_countprefabs() and it will work! That's really exciting so the only other thing I need to figure out is how save the string from user input. Any tips appreciated.

[MidrealmDM]

Why not just copy the code from consolecommands.lua ?

function c_countprefabs(prefab, noprint)
    local count = 0
    for k,v in pairs(Ents) do
        if v.prefab == prefab then
            count = count + 1
        end
    end
    if not noprint then
        print("There are ", count, prefab.."s in the world.")
    end
    return count
end