hey all. I am trying to write a sequencer (i know i know) and i need to store values into a coll or some kind of lookup table. I am trying to do this with [tosymbol] and [fromsymbol] pairs to make sure that I can separate note events in each beat. It ends up looking like this in the coll file

instrument1 pattern1 step1 , (note1 64 127 1000 0) (note2 127 500 0)

where each parentheses pair represents something that has been tosymbol-ed together into a list and the extra numbers represent MIDInote# velocity duration and shift. This is good because when i am calling back the info i've stored i can break up the individual lists and then fromsymbol each separate note event to get my info out like so:

[beat info goes in <
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[coll stored-info]
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[zl iter 1]
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[fromsymbol]
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[output = (note1 64 127 1000 0), (note2 127 500 0), etc as seperate lists]

The problem with this method is that coll does not seem to store/recall tosymbol information correctly when i save it as a txt file and try to recall it :/ Has anyone tried saving nested lists in a file before? I would like to avoid putting in extra symbols because i want to keep the original file readable but any help on this topic is greatly appreciated.

It's not a [coll] issue, it's a Pd issue. Pd automatically reads spaces as separators in lists. It can remember spaces as parts of symbols while running, but once it reads from a file it can't tell the difference.

Pd isn't really set up for nested lists. You might be better off using [list2symbol] to replace the spaces with another character. For example:

[note1 64 127 1000 0(
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[list2symbol -]
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[print]

will give you "symbol note1-64-127-1000-0". Then, you can break it back into a list this way:

[note1-64-127-1000-0(
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[symbol2list -]
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[print]

which will give you "list note1 64 127 1000 0".

that seems to do the trick, exactly how it is in max. i still need to see if it works with saving/ recalling coll files