Brian H.

Assuming for a moment that there isn't anything wrong with my regex itself, the object seems to be taking all the quotes out of the file, which makes it invalid. It's an XML file, and I've sent filetype TEXT message just to be sure.

It's also seemingly randomly lopping-off the first chunk of my file, ending at some characters near a closing tag, but that's less of a deal to workaround.

Assuming for a moment that there isn't anything wrong with my regex itself, the object seems to be taking all the quotes out of the file, which makes it invalid.  It's an XML file, and I've sent filetype TEXT message just to be sure.

regex-and-quotes

OK, I'm figuring this is related to the shell doing its thing, similar Unix. But then is there way to deal with it? There probably several hundred quote marks in the file I'm processing. Would I have to take it to a word processor to do a simple search/replace with an escape character before I can use regex? Would that be ironic...

OK, I'm figuring this is related to the shell doing its thing, similar Unix.  But then is there way to deal with it?  There probably several hundred quote marks in the file I'm processing.  Would I have to take it to a word processor to do a simple search/replace with an escape character before I can use regex?  Would that be ironic...


Don't forget that quotation marks are a special character in Max (analogously to the shell). Also don't forget that there is no such thing as'text' in Max messages, just symbols. A symbol is more than a naked string of characters.

The long and short of it is that you will have to think up something clever for handling any text file that has lots of quotation marks. Sorry not to have a simple solution for your problem at hand... something may occur to me later...

Thanks, that's what I needed to know. Good point about text in Max. But it's chewing-up these XML files I'm feeding it because they're loaded with " < > characters. Is there some other mechanism for dealing with XML in Max? (I don't know enough to ask a better question.) I'm actually trying to do some basic parsing and data manipulation for nothing related to media...but some things I know how to do in Max, and it would take much more effort to string it together in unix at this point.

Thanks, that's what I needed to know.  Good point about text in Max.  But it's chewing-up these XML files I'm feeding it because they're loaded with " < > characters.  Is there some other mechanism for dealing with XML in Max?  (I don't know enough to ask a better question.)  I'm actually trying to do some basic parsing and data manipulation for nothing related to media...but some things I know how to do in Max, and it would take much more effort to string it together in unix at this point.

When I was doing some text-processing (for custom pref files etc), I decided that the way of least pain was usually to do it in javascript, including reading/writing the files.

[regex] and quotes...