Cycling 74 » Topic: Formatting messages

Formatting messages

Mark Durham — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 14:03:22 +0000

Hi all,

This has been driving me mad for the past hour or so, so I thought I’d ask for some help.

I have a number and a list.

Lets say the number is 4 and the list is 1 2 3 4

I want to format this for use with [forward] so i need it to read:

send actor4, 1 2 3 4

I’ve been trying to adapt some [sprintf] and [regexp] examples from other posts but don’t understand these enough to get this right.

Any help would be appreciated,

Mark

Re: Formatting messages

Tim Lloyd — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 14:18:58 +0000

Here you go :)

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Re: Formatting messages

laonikoss — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 14:22:20 +0000

Here’s a way to do it, using [sprintf] and [zl join]:

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Where did you get stuck? Was it in creating the “send actorX,” or in joining that to the list? If it is always ever going to be numbers you can simplify it, so it depends of course on the application.

Hope this helps :) (remember that when needing to format in a comma, you need to add a forward slash before the comma)

Re: Formatting messages

Tim Lloyd — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 14:24:55 +0000

Hmm, mine doesn’t work when feeding [forward] – use laonikoss’s

Re: Formatting messages

Mark Durham — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 14:29:59 +0000

Thanks Tim,

So simple when you know how!

If anyone knows of some good tutorials to help understand sprintf, I’d love hear about them.

Re: Formatting messages

Mark Durham — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 14:38:44 +0000

Aah yes, thanks for your version laonikoss.

I got stuck with adding the comma to the word actor. I could only get actor4,

Really through my lack of understanding when it comes to sprintf though…

Re: Formatting messages

Christopher Dobrian — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 14:52:51 +0000

Just a note: You don’t need to mess with a comma at all. The commas in the message boxes in the forward.help file are just there in order to combine two messages in a single clickable message box. But you can just use sprintf to construct the desired receiver name (such as “actor4″), then tell forward what you want to send.

By the way, the help file for sprintf has a link to an informative Wikipedia page (can’t get much more helpful than that!), although that’s probably way more information than you want or need, so GIYF.

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Re: Formatting messages

Mark Durham — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 17:01:44 +0000

@ Christopher, Thanks for pointing that out… I can’t believe I didn’t notice that! Actually I didn’t realize message boxes worked in this way, so that’s probably the most useful thing learned today.

As for the sprintF commands, Probably there’s no shortcuts to learning that stuff, just a shame Google can’t break it up and feed it to me a bit at a time, perhaps while I’m sleeping?

Re: Formatting messages

Chris Muir — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 17:46:03 +0000

What Christopher said. The comma in message boxes has been the stumbling block of many a Max user. Once you know that it’s just a shorthand for combining messages into a single message box, things get a lot easier.

Re: Formatting messages

laonikoss — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 08:35:32 +0000

When not using the comma, you just need to make sure the order in which the messages arrive at [forward] is correct – i.e. you must first send the [send actor4] message, and then the list you want to send to “actor4″, or whatever.

sprintf comes from C (programming language) – as the help page for [sprintf] says, “For complete documentation, refer to a standard C library reference manual.” which I guess answers your question as to where to find more information.