Hi all
I've just begun my foray into OSC/udp within PD, and I've got a simple patch working on my machine (localhost). How can I extract a dynamic variable from the datagram? Simple patch attached

BrendanmyFirstOSC.pd

Youd patch used only a UDP connection, no OSC format in messages sent. Even though you typed an OSC-style address in a message, that's not an OSC format. OSC format is bytes that are not so human-readable. You need to incorporate the native OSC objects that come with vanilla, [oscformat] and [oscparse].
Here's a screenshot that does what you probably want (note that the OSC address in [oscformat] can omit the forward slashes, but since this is a standard OSC-style address, I kept them there):

Thanks for the clear explanation; works very well; I guess I got tied up with strings and symbols. Loving my new PD journey (old MaxMSP head here)