How to reference lua table member from table member?

i have a table in lua:

enUS = {   LOCALE_STHOUSANDS = ",",  --Thousands separator e.g. comma   patNumber = "%d+["..LOCALE_STHOUSANDS.."%d]*", --regex to find a number   ["PreScanPatterns"] = {      ["^("..patNumber..") Armor$"] = "ARMOR",   }}

So you see there is a whole chain of self-references in this table:

• LOCAL_STHOUSANDS
  • patNumber
    • ["^("..patNumber..") Armor$"]

How can i perform self-referencing in an lua table?

What i don't want to do is have to hard-replace the values; there are hundreds of references:

enUS = {   LOCALE_STHOUSANDS = ",",  --Thousands separator e.g. comma   patNumber = "%d+[,%d]*", --regex to find a number   ["PreScanPatterns"] = {      ["^(%d+[,%d]*) Armor$"] = "ARMOR",   }}