Hi all,
As is probably evident by this very basic question I'm quite new to Pd. I'm stuck at a mundane issue – I've tried searching for answers to this but have come up surprisingly empty handed. I probably just don't know what terms to search for.

I'm trying to communicate with a lighting control software to set the target positions of moving lights – the end goal is to use CV from a modular synth for this, but for now I'm just trying to get the message formatting right. The manual for the receiving software says this about the protocol:

*When set to MQ Track, MagicQ receives tracker data over a simple UDP protocol on UDP port 6549. The format of the data received is:

<x>,<y>,<z>,<tracker id>,<tracker name>

For example, sending tracker 2 named "Bob" with position x of 2m, y of 3m and z of 3.5m the data in the UDP message would be

2,3,3.5,2,Bob*

OK, simple enough – but for the life of me I just cannot figure out how to send these numbers, delimited by commas, without any whitespace in between them!

My first attempt was:

|2 3 3.5 (
|
|list $1 $2 $3 1 Bob (
|
|list prepend send|
|
|list trim|
|
|netsend -u|

The result of this is that only the first number, the X coordinate, is received. Apparently the whitespace afterwards messes things up.

Next attempt involved using list2symbol and makefilename to create "2,3,3.5,2,Bob" as a symbol. That works, but I have absolutely no idea how to send it over UDP. For instance, I tried:

....
|
|list2symbol|
|
|send $1(
|
|netsend -u|

But still only the X coordinate works. Printing the output of |send $1( shows up as:

send 3.3,2.2,1.1,1,Bob

To be honest I don't know if those backslashes actually get sent or just appear when printing, but in any case, it does not work.

For what it's worth, I have managed to get this to work on the receving end by sending these messages as strings from Processing. Would prefer to use PureData for this, though.

Any clues?

@GardG No, it is not obvious at all that you are new to Pd..... this causes problems for everyone.
Commas and carriage returns........ "," and ";" are reserved characters in Pd (and many other programs)..... so cannot be part of a message. Backslashes would be dropped by Pd as well until Pd Vanilla 0.49.
Unfortunately backslashes don't print on this forum either.
The problem you have is that a comma in Pd is interpreted as "new message" so the commas in any message you create just break it up into a series of messages.
Chamsys needs it in one udp packet.
No idea if this will work.......... conundrum.pd
This is built for Vanilla.
If you are using Extended then you will need to use [moocow/any2bytes] and [moocow/bytes2any] instead of [list tosymbol] and [list fromsymbol].
No idea if chamsys is expecting ascii.
Their doc says "a simple message" and so gives no detailed information....?
The backslashes are not being sent in this patch..... but they show up if Pd receives the message as the commas are double escaped by Pd..

If it is looking for hexadecimal ascii then this might work...... conundrum-hex.zip
as it apparently drops whitespace.
You could try [netsend -u -b] as well for all cases.
David.

Well that explains why I didn't get it – but your ASCII example actually works (when sent as binary)! Absoltely superb, that means I can finally get rid of the Processing program I've been using to replace whitespace with commas. Now I'll just have to understand how it actually works.

Thanks a lot!!