[PD] unable to type certain characters

[IOhannes m zmoelnig]

On 2016-07-26 15:50, Christof Ressi wrote:
>> 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)

this is the reason why they are forbidden: these characters have a
special meaning in tcl/tk and rather than properly escaping them (and
going through hell) they are just forbidden (which saves the devs a lot
of hassle).

> 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.

well, those use-cases should be catered for easily enough: just use some
other characters instead of the forbidden ones, and replace them before
doing the actual processing.
e.g. "{" -> "<<" and "}" -> ">>"
and then run the following json string through
  `sed -e 's|<<|{|g' -e '|>>|}|g'`:
["foo", <<"bar": ["baz", null, 1.0, 2]>>]

(only to discover that while you can type semicolons in Pd, they are
treated somewhat special...)

> 
> 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.

that's because the [text] window lacks character checker. it probably
should be there as well.

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

see above.

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

because you really cannot.
(at least not in a way that is much more meaningful than the "keycode
dropped" on the patch level)

> 
> 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'?

well, it's pretty easy to create this characters: [makefilename %c] to
the rescue.

fgasdmr
IOhannes

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