[PD] Sending data from PD to another program

[Frank Barknecht]

Hallo,
Jared Kling hat gesagt: // Jared Kling wrote:
> 
> Thanks for responding. I've been playing with state-machine.pd and think 
> I'm getting a grasp of it. At every line, the choice made will send the 
> state machine to that line's choice. For example, consider the following 
> example file, with line numbers in parentheses for easier reading...
> 3 4\; (line 0)
> 2 3\; (line 1)
> 0 1\; (line 2)
> 0 0\; (line 3)
> 3 1\; (line 4)
> 
> So the initial choices would be 3 and 4. choosing 4 would send the state 
> machine to line 4, where the choices would be 3 and 1, etc.

Yes, exactly.

> So I'll need to go through and set every 'node' of the story to a line 
> in the text file, with it's options sending it to the possible voting 
> choices. Since every node has, at most, 2 choices that shouldn't be a 
> problem.
> 
> My question would then be how can I go about labeling each line? I'm 
> assuming the \; at the end of each line is a line delimiter, so I could 
> put notes to myself after that line. It also seems like I could make 
> each line set up as follows:
> (linenumber1) (choicename1) (linenumber2) (choicename2)
> so it would look like
> 12 Go_Upstairs 7 Stay_Downstairs \;
> 
> Then I could display them simply by replacing the [unpack 0 0] with 
> [unpack 0 0 0 0] and the outlets would match the numbers and titles.

Basically yes. However you would need to use [unpack 0 s 0 s] because
every second element is a symbol, not a number, and also the [pd nth]
patch would need to be adapted: You need to select the first and third
element of the choice-list, that is, send a 0 and a 2 to the right
inlet.

However I guess it would be easier to keep it as it is, and use
another textfile only for translating numbers to labels. This textfile
would load a textfile only with labels, like: 
  
  Go_Upstairs
  Stay_Downstairs
  Fall_from_a_Tree
  ...

and you would use a simular construct as in [pd get-line...] to fetch
the correct label from that textfile by line-number.

Btw: It occured to me, that the version I had posted was actually
showing the past selection, not the one that a user can choose ATM. I
attached a slight modification, so that the "possible state
transitions" now show the possible *next* states to select.

> I guess I have two final questions, both slightly tangential. First, how 
> do you get a textfile to be read in by state-machine? You're using 
> random numbers to generate a list of numbered pairs and I can't seem to 
> figure out how to actually get it to read in from text, either from 
> looking through the PD list archive and the reference material. I feel 
> like this is probably one of those simple questions that I just haven't 
> been able to find the answer to.

You use a "read filename.txt" message. Check out the help-patch for
textfile. There is also the "read filename.txt cr" message possible
which would treat a normal linebreak as a line ending, so you can omit
the ";" that normally terminates lines in [textfile].


> Second, is there a way to have the titles in each line contain spaces? 
> That is, have the lines look like something like...
> 12 "Go Upstairs" 7 "Stay Downstairs"
> 
> Conversely, is there an easy way to strip out underscores?

There is no easy way, especially not if you store "mixed" lines like: 
"12 Go_Upstairs 7 Stay_Downstairs": Because then a space would mess up
the numbe of items like this:

Index: 0  1           2 3
Line:  12 Go_Upstairs 7 Stay_Downstairs

Index: 0  1  2        3 4    5
Line:  12 Go Upstairs 7 Stay Downstairs

However if you use a second textfile for labels as I recommend above,
you could use the abstraction [list-l2s] from the [list]-abs
collection to convert the lists stored in the label-textfile (like "Go
Downstairs") to symbols containing spaces easily. 

I put an example for the conversion into attached file as well.

Ciao
-- 
 Frank Barknecht                 _ ______footils.org_ __goto10.org__
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