Quotation marks needed in a message object to enable a hyperlink searching a website - but how?
It's great to be able to link out to a web browser from a message box.
I have been able to concatenate the google sitesearch with single word search terms i.e.
; max launchbrowser https://www.google.com/search?sitesearch=cycling74.com&;q=RNBO
However, when trying to get an exact phrase the message box will turn this:
https://www.google.com/search?sitesearch=cycling74.com&;q=RNBO+"Raspberry Pi"
into this:
"https://www.google.com/search?sitesearch=cycling74.com&;q=RNBO+Raspberry Pi" (before the concatenation with ; max launchbrowser)
How can I get it to be:
;
max launchbrowser https://www.google.com/search?sitesearch=cycling74.com&;q=RNBO+"Raspberry Pi"
in the message box ready to launch the correct web page.
N.B. Typing the link in manually Google automatically inserts a %20 in the gap between "Raspberry" and "Pi"
Any help with this conundrum would be much appreciated as it is stalling an app at the moment.
Cheers
Russell
I got a working solution:
;
max launchbrowser "https://www.google.com/search?sitesearch=cycling74.com&q=RNBO+\\\"Raspberry Pi\\\""So put the whole URL in quotation marks, and triple escape quotation marks from the request with backslash!
This said, be careful when you copy this kind of text from a Max message box then past it here, as it adds an extra semicolon between & and q for some reason (see your original post), and we don't want it when we copy that resulting text and past it back into a Max message.
EDIT: apparently you can avoid quotation marks around the whole URL, but then you need to replace spaces by %20 or +. The %20 is the "litteral" translation of a space character, although the + does the same in an expression between quotation marks.
;
max launchbrowser https://www.google.com/search?sitesearch=cycling74.com&q=RNBO+\\\"Raspberry%20Pi\\\"works too.
adding %20 seems to be the simplest way; what works from the browser textfield will also work from open transport (or however that is called today), but using + for google is probably even better.
I think OP wants to make the following request: `RNBO "Raspberry Pi" site:cycling74.com` and not `RNBO Raspberry PI site:cycling74.com` so that Googles searches for the exact expression "Raspberry Pi" and not any combination of "Raspberry" and/or "Pi".
Apparently the + operator is depreciated since 2011 and gives inconsistent results.
i totally missed that you still need the quotation marks no matter how you supply the space.
that + for the "normal" space is confusing, i would prefer to write
;
max launchbrowser https://www.google.com/search?sitesearch=cycling74.com&;q=RNBO%20\\\"Raspberry%20Pi\\\"
which works equally.
more difficult is... how to format such a messagebox containing spaces programmatically in max. :)
p.s.:
in many cases using a hyphen between two words gives you almost the same results in search engines like google, simpy because the term does not exist written exactly like that.
this way it is really easy to format the strings required without any special character and data type magic.
more difficult is... how to format such a messagebox containing spaces programmatically in max. :)
It's a (ugly but functional) start :)
EDIT: use [regexp " " @substitute %%20] to get %20 instead of +
hehe, except that %20 can not be written into sprintf. :)
(make sure to limit textedit to 1 line and add a mechanism for autoclear and return= shoot)
Why would you use [sprintf] when [regexp] writes the %20 and [combine] combines everything together?
I'm intrigued even though i think we've gone too far for OP's question :)
combine is too newish for me, and regexp too complicated.
and of course i structured it modular so that you can add more terms or terms of three words without thinking too much.
can someone explain why with [list] the triple backslash gets lost and with [combine] not?
Hey Both
Fantastic work. I had no idea how to do this and you've supplied the solution(s).
I am going with TFL [combine] method, partly because I've never used [combine] before.
Re. %20, using :
RNBO+\\\"Raspberry+Pi\\\"
results in:
RNBO \"Raspberry Pi\" site:cycling74.com
on the browser for some reason so no %20 problem
Thanks so much for your help.
Russell
P.S.
Nothing is ugly in Presentation mode