Hello Community,
this is my first post here..
i've been using pd for over a year now and am still stunned by the possibilities.
ive built some pretty complex patches in those last 12 months and am mostly self-taught, meaning i usually find a way myself for solving a problem , but i am at my wits end here so here we go..

i am building a sequencer at the moment and it needs a function to save and recall patterns, aka in my case lists of 1s and 0s.
i managed to get the sequences into lists and then read from them.
but when i want to write those lists to a textfile i always get an error message.
i know it has to do with the path specified.
my question is about how exactly the path has to be named to write a textfile?
which keys are accepted and which aren't?
i am aware that you can't have [space] in the pathname, is that correct?
but omitting all [spaces] isn't working either.
maybe there are problems with caps as well?
what do your paths look like when you are writing to textfile?

i also tried writing the data to and reading from arrays and also tables as well as storing them as messages and then read from them and it all works, but this is specifically about learning how to use the [textfile] object correctly. so please no advice on workarounds, however elegant they may be

note: ive also tried writing to folders that don't require administrator rights. didnt work. i managed to find the right way of naming the path at some point yesterday, but then pd crashed and i forgot..
guess my mind was a bit strained after trying this for 2 hours..
(wish i was running on windows xp, but it it windows 7 for the time being..)
anyway, hope you can help and have nice weekend!

sorry, maybe a windows user has better knowledge for you,

but on my mac i just did:

write /Users/user/Desktop/textfile_Check.txt

inside a message box; sent that to textfile, and it works fine

so, underscores, capital letters, that sort of thing seem fine. Of course backslashes are not ok, but they will give you a general pd error, not just in textfile, so i guess you know that already. And yeah, you can't have a space in the path name usually. Maybe their might be some workaround to that, but i just always make my paths and filenames without spaces, it's easiest.

What is the write message you are sending? perhaps if you post that, the problem might become clearer.

just post your patch, it will be easier to answer your question.

hey thanks to both of your quick answers-
at dwan:i am not at home at the moment, can't post it now-but are you sure it would help?
i mean, the patch structure doesn't really change anything about how the path is to be specified.
at mod: i've tried a lot of variations of [write c:/ProgramFiles(x86)/pd/testtext.txt]
maybe the":" in "c:/" doens't work and should be omitted?

i have a 64 bit windows pc and there are 2 program files folders. but it didn't work in other folders either, apart from that one combination that passed my mind..

As long as the folder exists and contains no spaces there should be no problem. I'm also on win7-64 and haven't had any problems so far. But of course [c:/ProgramFiles(x86)] with all its spaces removed can't be used of course, because the actual foldername does contain spaces.

try making another new directory directly on top of your c drive,

eg: c:/myNewDirectory/testtext.txt

then try [write c:/myNewDirectory/testtext.txt (

Result!
turns out my alleged pure data problem was in fact a windows problem-
also with earlier installations of pd, i always saved patches to a patch folder in the pd dir.
i noticed that although i was saving patches to c:/program files/pd/patchs, they wouldnt appear in that folder. they were by some bizarre new windows routine saved to a folder called something like Users/App/Local/Virtual Store/pd/patchs, don*t know why actually. but when opening or saving a patch in pure data, it just shows this directory as being simply the real one, meaning just "program files/pd/patchs"..
and this where you browse to in the file browser to save as well but it doesnt save there..
freakin windows.. so confusing..now i*ve looked into that folder again and what did i find?
about 50 textfiles with their names being all the combinations and version i*ve tried out-
so yes it works.
and again, windows is doing its best in advertising apple