Hello all,
Is there a way to use commas in messages boxes and have them NOT be "separators" for the message when using them as a list? I am trying to place text in a canvas box and really would like to use proper punctuation. Right now, I am replacing commas with apostrophes.

Is there an easy fix to this?

For instance:

|list July 4, 2016(
|
|set $1 $2 $3(
|
|2016(

This crops out July 4.

Is there any work around for this?

Will not recognize July 4 when sending this list. Right? Is there a way to do this easily?

You can add a comma dynamically to a message, but it won't go through as a label to a canvas.
Check this immage

This effectively adds a comma and then the rest of what you want to add to your message, but if you try to send this to a canvas in the message form "label July 4, 2016", the canvas will only get "July", because there's a space after it. Even if you replace spaces with underscores, the message will pass up until the comma.

You gotta do some ASCII tricks to get reserved characters like commas into symbols. You can do it with [makefilename] or [list tosymbol], like this:

If you don't want to use [zexy/list2symbol] for the spaces, you can do something similar to make that happen.

I tried to figure out how to do this without zexy, and maybe its possible, but I managed to get backslashes into messages. A lot of them, and it destroyed the state of the canvas in the tcl, I managed to produce a bunch of errors.

Careful with [list tosymbol] - Hopefully we will eventually have a string object to go along with the array and list objects.

Thanks alexandros, Maelstorm, and Monetus,
You have all been helpful. Not sure how I want to implement this, if at all, but I probably will at some later time after my composition is closer to being finished. Maelstorms's second example worked for me.