Thank you! It was instructive to look at pbank in any case, and I have figured it out now.

One thing that was really confusing me was that I had been passing -c to read and my file had both semicolons and newlines, and so I was getting blank lines in-between the lines I expected.

Hello all! I'm an experienced software engineer but a pd newbie.

For the patch I'm working on, I have the settings being output on several lines which each represent parameters for conceptually distinct parts of the patch. It's important to me to keep the output format with these sections on separate lines for purposes of future development / my sanity / general hygiene, etc.

However, I cannot figure out how to read these lines separately, in order. I'm sure I'm missing something basic, but after hours of trying to puzzle through the documentation and the net in general, I haven't found one which gives me the pieces I seem to need. I don't need anything fancy, just something which allows me to separately dispatch each specific line to code that will parse it and send the proper messages to set up the patch accordingly. There is a known number of lines, so no fancy logic is warranted, just: first line, do this, second line, do this other thing.... up to the sixth line.

If anyone can point me to an example of something like this, I would be quite grateful.