Help... text: can't find file problem

darkflow's icon

Hi all,
I'm making a Max patch that needs to drag and drop files onto a dropfile and then load the file up into a text object to do processing/converting.

When I simply prepend "read" to the output of the dropfile and connect it to the "text" object, it can't find the file... well it's right there in the place where it can't find it... So I tried using "conformpath" to convert the file path into another format and what ever format I put it in, it can't find the file:

error: Text: can't find file HD:/blah/text.txt - when that is the correct location.

Any pointers anyone?

Thanks,
Alain

Dg's icon

not "read" but "set"

Max Patch
Copy patch and select New From Clipboard in Max.


darkflow's icon

Thanks for the reply but that doesn't solve it - I am trying to drag and drop a file to be directly loaded into the Text object. If I use "set" instead of "read", it doesn't load the file, it just adds the file path string to my text objects memory...

Rob Ramirez's icon

dropfile -> prepend read -> text
works fine over here.

i know i've had some problems with harddrives that aren't the root drive in the past, but without having a patch from you illustrating the problem, it's all speculation.

-rob

darkflow's icon

Thanks for you help guys, I have solved it now - basically it was max being a plonker. All the time I've been trying to debug it, I had max open. After giving up and closing max, now coming back to it it works fine!

So yeah, it should be as easy as dropfile -> prepend read -> text and now it works (but didn't before for unknown reason X).

I should have know because I have encountered this restart and it works stuff a handful of times before...

Alain

darkflow's icon

Hold on, the problem is back and I know why. If I make a text file in text edit with the contents of "hello", and drop it into max it works, but I am dropping in .csv files from a spreadsheet (renamed .txt, which are plain text containing quotes and commas) and it wont work.

So its not a case of Text not finding stuff sometimes, it just says that it can't find it when something goes wrong... (tut tut).

Interestingly when I remove the first line from the offending files which contains quotes (".....") it miraculously works... I find it a bit crap that Text can't read text with quotes but I now know just not to use quotes.

Thanks,
Alain