How to know when mesage is blanck
The title is pretty much it
Thanks
Please post your patch. Empty messages box doesn't broadcast anything when clicked ('cause it is nothing to broadcast), so - from this point of view - the problem seems to be more philosophical than technical ;-)
Check this for simple, generic technique:
Hey Yaniki,
Took me a while to respond; hope this finds you well.
I've been wrestling the no-output issue as well. Put in a feature request for NULL output if the message is blank. Should not be too problematic, should it?
I came to the same conclusion as you did: it needs a front end that signals an expectation unmet.
Here's my patcher, which also outputs the message, if any:
you can build it around boolean logic, which (also) outputs a state (true) if the message does exist.
empty message is only one case where you might want
to get "nothing here" feedback.
for exampe not existing coll index or empty preset slot.
I use this kind of check :
THE OBJECTIVE:
Replace a list segment with another one.
BACKGROUND:
Working in Max 8.5.7 (my old iMac can’t handle higher).
So no fancy string objects…
This all comes from the need to change a series of bytes in a sysex message contained in a coll without changing the others.
Tried nsub, but that handles only one byte at a time and puts a fatal drag on everything else going on.
So I thought it might speed things up if I split the entire line it into head, body and tail,
replace the body, put everything together again and store it back to the coll.
I connected two zl.slice objects so that the head comes out the left outlet of the first one, the body out of the left of the second one and the tail out of its righty.
The first slice is made at the insertion point, the second one, now headless, at the length of the list to insert.
THE ISSUE:
When the insertion point is at the start of the string (position 1), the first slice [zl.slice 1] puts out the first element of the list as the head and not the first element of the body.
So subtract 1 from the position; then [zl.slice 0] outputs the entire list at right and nothing on the left.
Yes, it is the old Empty Message problem again!
Since the head goes into the hot inlet of the join, there won’t be any joining.
SOLUTION:
Preload the zl.regs holding the head and the tail with a null character using itoa, then bang them when processing is complete. If zl.slice did not output anything, the null will be output instead and trigger the join anyway without affecting the list.
Still have to see whether it is indeed faster than nsubbing the coll and if that solves the underlying issue, which I won’t get into here.
I have wrestled enough with the Emtpy Message Issue (EMI) to know I’m not the only one, so here’s one solution. But if anyone can come up with a more efficient approach…?