hey folks - greetings to the board!

i'm in the middle of designing a pretty simple sample playback and recording setup and i've consistently run into some issues that i seem to only be able to solve by using [del] which i know is generally discouraged. but it doesn't seem to work properly in the accepted way using a trigger. here's an example where i get the size of an array:

[array size]
|
[set $1(
|
[t a b]
|   /
| ___ (

so, what happens in this case is when i bang the [array size] object, the blank message box at the very bottom is updated (it's connected to a send object which i did not draw) but its value is not sent by the bang coming from the trigger object. if instead i insert a [del 25] object after the bang outlet everything works properly. i'm pretty sure i'm likely not doing something right but to me it looks like the bang happens too fast and doesn't have time to send the message out, but i've seen this behavior when reading from [openpanel] too, and when switching between arrays. see the pic below.

can anyone shed some light on this situation? it seems like [trigger] should work but it's consistently late.

thanks in advance!

@metaphysician Pd evaluates operations in a strict right to left order, so this order works:

Note that in the second example the first message is send first and the second message, the bang, is send last.

Also maybe consider this as a simpler approach to load a file to an array:

Even simpler:

ooh interesting! i though i'd have to use [pack] or something, but forgot that message boxes can contain multiple items. most excellent - will update the patch accordingly. thanks!

@metaphysician Yes you can use [pack] instead of [list]. I prefer [list], but this is personal preference

Here is another example using [pack]. I give 1 as a default for the float, so it will work even if no buffer is selected