jamesson

To be specific, I'm trying to split a test string and 32 floats while keeping the floats together and in order. Surely there's a better way than the above mess?

alternatives-to-unpack

In your example, are you always dealing with a list comprising a single symbol followed by n (32 in your case) floats?

[edit willyc beat me by a minute, but only because I provided an example :-) ]

They say a patch is worth a thousand words....

also, in the case of OSC, a structure like this can help keep your hierarchy of incoming messages intact over time, as the number of inputs grows:

It strips away / and makes it a space instead, so you can use a normal [route] object to parse the message.

But again, this was in the case of OSC - if you're not using that then just ignore it.

Oh, that's what cnmat oscroute is for - do you know it?

and there's jmod.oscroute too, which is nice as well.

alternatives to (un)pack