Garrett

Trying to stop a textedit from outputting text when there is nothing to output (i.e. it's empty) and I thought this would work:

but I can't seem to get route (or select) to differentiate between text and a bang. It seems as if the bang is possibly not in fact a bang but "bang" (as text) - is this possible? What am I doing wrong here?

but I can't seem to get route (or select) to differentiate between text and a bang.  It seems as if the bang is possibly not in fact a bang but "bang" (as text) - is this possible?  What am I doing wrong here?

textedit-output-differentiation

When textedit doesn't have anything in it, it just sends out the messages "text". Because everything coming out of textedit starts with "text", the route sends everything through the 2nd outlet. Because route strips off the matching symbo, it has nothing to send out when the input is just "text", so it sends a bang.

When I need to differentiate these two cases, I look at the length of the textedit output, like this:

I reread your original post and saw you just want to stop the output when it is empty. So here's a simpler patch that should do exactly what you want.

Thanks, works great, never even thought of checking the length of it to be honest I was trying to figure out how to check for a text that was empty or a "" (empty string) in programming - seems max does really have a quite peculiar logic all of its own.

textedit output differentiation