Sasha Harris-Cronin

I ran into an interesting max javascript feature yesterday. I found the workaround, but thought I'd mention it. Basically, initializing a String at declaration will interfere with testing for a file with the same name as that string.

Or, more verbosely, the following function will always report that the file with the filename passed to it exists, even if the file does not.

function checkForFile(fileName) //check to see if file exists

    if (f.isopen) //if succeed in opening file

        post("found file: " + fileName + "n");

        f.close(); //anal retentively close file

        post("could not find file: " + fileName + "n");

If I change the string declaration to be like this, however:

Then it works fine. Don't pick on programming style, by the way. I know that it is fully unnecessary to declare s in the first place. This was just a concise example. It is not specific to a local function either. If a string is declared with that text outside of the function, the function still misreports the file.

String is obviously part of javascript 1.5, but File IO is a max/msp add. I'm curious about what's going on under the hood to make that happen.

I ran into an interesting max javascript feature yesterday.  I found the workaround, but thought I'd mention it.  Basically, initializing a String at declaration will interfere with testing for a file with the same name as that string.

Then it works fine.  Don't pick on programming style, by the way.  I know that it is fully unnecessary to declare s in the first place.  This was just a concise example.  It is not specific to a local function either.  If a string is declared with that text outside of the function, the function still misreports the file.

String is obviously part of javascript 1.5, but File IO is a max/msp add.  I'm curious about what's going on under the hood to make that happen.

string-declaration-and-opening-files

but can confirm that is happening with me too.

I had struck this the first time i used f.isopen

and had incorrectly thought that it could not be used to check for the existence of files and have been laboriously trawling through folder objects to check for files.

so sorry that i can't help but thank you for posting this

can't help with an answer,
but can confirm that is happening with me too.

I had struck this the first time i used f.isopen
and had incorrectly thought that it could not be used to check for the existence of files and have been laboriously trawling through folder objects to check for files.

so sorry that i can't help but thank you for posting this


String declaration and opening Files