[PD] unable to type certain characters

[Christof Ressi]

> though of course this is not the real reason why these keys are forbidden.

so what is the real reason?


to me it feels weird that these three characters (which are omnipresent in most languages) should be totally forbidden in Pd. right now it seems like I can't build things like regular expressions, java script code or JSON data in a way which isn't totally akward and defeats the purpose of human-readable formats.

after some more trying I discovered that I can actually safely type '{' and '}' within a [text] window, although I still get the 'keycode dropped' error in the console. '\' on the other hand only works together with ';' to escape the semicolon. apart from that it will always be dropped. 

some questions:

why can I type curly braces in [text] but not in a message box?

why can I escape a semicolon in [text] but not in a message box?

even if there should be a serious technical reason for why a user shall not be able to type these characters in a message box, would it at least be possible to create them dynamically, e.g. with a message similar to 'addsemi', 'addcomma' or 'adddollar'?


Christof


> Gesendet: Dienstag, 26. Juli 2016 um 13:44 Uhr
> Von: "IOhannes m zmoelnig" <zmoelnig at iem.at>
> An: pd-list at lists.iem.at
> Betreff: Re: [PD] unable to type certain characters
>
> On 2016-07-26 13:01, Christof Ressi wrote:
> > which characters are 'forbidden' in Pd message boxes? E.g. I'm unable to type a backslash or curly braces. I get the following error message: 
> > 
> > 'keycode #N dropped' (where #N is the ASCII code). 
> 
> yes this is expected behaviour, on all operating systems.
> among other things, this prevents w32 users from using backslash as
> directory delimiter¹.
> 
> the list of forbidden characters is exactly this: \, {, }
> 
> fgmasdr
> IOhannes
> 
> ¹ though of course this is not the real reason why these keys are forbidden.
> 
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