[PD] spaces in messages (again)

[Olaf Matthes]

Hi list,

I was trying to pass some text on to an external. My problem is that I
need spaces! My first idea was to use '=' instead of spaces (since '='
is not needed) but I realisied that pd 'steals' them from my patches.
When I have a messagebox like [TITLE=my=stream] and save this patch all
'=''s are converted to spaces after reloading it. So this solution works
but makes patches 'unsaveable'.

Then I thought about using atoms like:

static void oggcast_comment(t_oggcast *x, t_symbol *s, t_int argc,
t_atom* argv)
{
   int i = argc;

   while(i--)
   {
      switch( argv->a_type) {
         case A_FLOAT:
         /* get numbers here, strcat() them to the rest */
         break;
         case A_SYMBOL:
         /* get symbols here, strcat() them to the rest */
         break;
         default:
         post("unknown type");
      }
      argv++;
   }
}

Isn't there any other way to get plain text into my external? The above
would just work for numbers (how to tell the difference between int and
float?) and text. What's about special characters? ...how does [print]
work, couldn't find the sources...

Olaf