@ingox I am writing this comment after a few months because today I stumbled inadvertently into a super simple vanilla solution to our problem.

Instead of using your vanilla toascii abstraction (that works wonders, don't get me wrong) you can just feed the full ascii string to the [fudiparse] object, and that will convert it for you!

Now my question is: am I missing something? Will this lead to problems? Or is it actually the "from ASCII to message" that we've been all dreaming of?

@hayasidist This list might help, but usually you install an external library if you know you need the contents of it.

Since Pd-0.47, the deken-plugin is included into Pure Data itself. Deken, a minimal package management system for Pure Data externals, can be accessed from the Help -> Find Packages menu. To know more about Deken, see https://github.com/pure-data/deken.

Regarding the "or even if I need them" question, there is no real answer to that. Personally I like to try and stick to Pd Vanilla as much as possible, to make my patches as future-proof and as portable as possible. However, there are certain things that cannot be achieved with the vanilla version alone. So it all depends on the goal and scope of your project!

@ingox first of all, thanks so much for the vanilla toascii abstraction. It works wonders! Other than thanking you I am here to ask you two things:

1. I find it mindblowing that to convert a symbol to a list (unicode, not ascii) in vanilla we have to go through all that convoluted process, while the zexy library with the symbol2list object did it elegantely in one move. Most probably all the convolution was done in the backend of the object itself, but still: am I missing something? Why doesn't vanilla offer an easy and straightforward way to convert a symbol exactly as is to a unicode list? Just thinking out loud, 'been banging my head for the last hour trying to find an easier way.
2. If I were to use your toascii.pd abstraction in an Arduino communication example patch to share on GitHub, how would you like me to reference you in the patch? Do you have a standard ref. to stick in a comment inside the patch? I tried to see if you had already uploaded it on GitHub but it seems like you didn't!

Thanks again!