A real newbie question i am afraid. Could someone please explain how to interpret the notation used on some posts? Those that provide screenshots or downloadable patches are perfectly clearly to me

but ..

An example would be this - (copied from here https://forum.pdpatchrepo.info/topic/5497/how-to-pass-a-variable-in-to-puredata/5)

[receive mayVar2]
|
|
[list2symbol]
|
|
[hello \

Is there a specific grammar and syntax for this style of notation? There are clearly much more complex examples.

Also the code that appear in the black boxes eg[ https://forum.pdpatchrepo.info/topic/12547/number-boxes-ip-address.

Thanks for tolerating my ignorance.

@gravityisahat It should resemble, in pictorial form, as near as possible, what it would look like in a patch. But that is very hard on the forum. Spacing pipes or slashes is difficult and some characters like * mean something in the forum so if you use a second one you are in trouble.
A screenshot is better, but especially if it is a heavy one it makes a lot of work for anyone trying to help as they have to carefully rebuild the patch so as to test.
Uploading the patch is good, but we get a bit fed up with copy/pasting into a text file and renaming it [something.pd]........ especially when there are other abstractions to treat in the same way.
A zip of the patch or the patch and any abstractions is best. A simple "extract" and the filenames are preserved and we can be testing immediately.

In "code view" ....... the black box...... two things happen. It highlights the bit that you want to emphasize, and there are no problems with special characters......

* \ etc. ***\\\\\\

In your example above they have tried to get as close as possible to what it looks like in a patch.
[object]
[message(
| ..... connection
David.

[message(
| \ connection to left and right inlet
[object]
| connection
[symbol \
[o] bang
[x] toggle
[12\ number
[---[]------] hslider

David and inbox. Thanks very much for the explanations. I appreciate the help.

Chris