I want to convert a message with a string in it, eg [HELLO(
into a message with a list of single characters in it, eg [list H E L L O(

Adding the word "list" on the beginning is easy enough but inserting the spaces seems impossible!
I could do this with Spell or something but i need to do it in Vanilla….
any ideas?

Try this:

I'm using a couple of objects from the list-abs library here for brevity. These are just Vanilla abstractions and you can recreate them as sub-patches if need be.

[list fromsymbol] and [list tosymbol] are only available in newer versions on Vanilla.

Hmm thanks.
I will have to update my PD to get this to work!
Looks like you can do a few things with [list] that I hadn't understood yet…….

@LiamG It's probably still a good idea to use [t b b] to explicitly order the two connections from the right outlet of [list-drip].

I can't think of a good reason someone might feed the output of [list] back into the top of the chain. But if there's any rule about Pd users, it's that if weird things are possible they will do them.

@nuromantix You can get list-abs easily using Deken if you're running a recent version of Vanilla. Othewise you can download it here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/pure-data/files/libraries/list-abs/. In order to have it run independently of these externals, you can just copy the [list-drip ] object into a sub-patch.

Thanks, I have list-abs but I don't seem to be able to use [list tosymbol] and [list fromsymbol].
I'll look into it!

Ah yes, forgot about those when reading your last response. [list fromsymbol] and [list tosymbol] came in around 0.45 or so, so I guess that updating is your best option. I'm pretty sure that there isn't another way of accomplishing your task without using externals. There are however two externals, [any2bytes] and [bytes2any] from the moocow library, that do basically the same thing.

OK it works but I'm still a bit stumped.
I can go even simpler in my patch and use the list of numbers generated by [list fromsymbol] without needing to turn them back into characters.
But I need a way to output the next item in the list each time I send a bang...
I can think of some ways to do it but they are very complicated.
can you suggest some way to "slow down" list-drip?
Thanks again!

@nuromantix upload.pd

This is the best I've managed but it seems quite inelegant.
I have to put "add2" on the beginning of my messages.

The "PD char route" object is sending messages to an LCD which needs little gaps between each nibble of data.

[list-dripslow], again from list-abs, does this in a really simple way:

However this is a bit inefficient, especially for longer lists, as it has to copy the remainder on each iteration. This is probably fine in your case, but if you're going to be using more than a few characters then a better solution is would be to write the list to an array using [array set] (also new to Vanilla) and then to iterate through the indices using [tabread] or [array get].

Thanks again!