Hi everybody! Thanks in advance for your help...

I'm trying to build a server to send and receive messages from multiple touch devices using the free app Fantastick due to its support of OpenGL (http://www.pinktwins.com/fantastick/). It was a tossup between this and Control (http://charlie-roberts.com/Control/). Both are excellent and free (which is important, because I don't want guests to my performance/installation to have to make the choice to pay for an app... credit will definitely be given where due, obviously!)

However! Caveats, caveats, caveats. Both apps communicate via UDP. And in order to make a server, I need to be able to associate incoming messages with an IP number, which the mrpeach objects provide (unlike [netreceive]).

The problem is, however, that, whereas I can decode incoming OSC messages using [unpackOSC], I am stuck trying to find a method to decode the lists of numbers being sent by Fantastick. [netreceive] does this just fine, but then I lose the IP address! And I can't seem to use both at the same time as a kludge.

So the question seems to be: how can I decode lists of ASCII numbers into lists of symbols and floats???

PS I'm prepared to build a Rube Goldberg-type solution to this using

and [makefilename] but even this will be weird because of the mixture of floats and symbols... so I'd prefer that somebody tell me about some magical external or something about the mrpeach or netreceive objects I've overlooked. ;o)

I guess I'm just annoyed that it's like, all the pieces I need are there, but NOT, or just in the wrong order or combination.

Here's the Rube Goldberg method, for anybody who cares. It converts lists of ASCII numbers into lists of numbers and/or symbols. Requires [l2s] and [s2l] in zexy.

Things to note:

* By default, the delimiter is "_", so that incoming ASCII spaces (32) get converted to this. You can change it if you need to use underscores in your namespace.

* As I understand it, PD doesn't allow certain characters to be displayed (most notably, {curly braces}) and I also don't need escaped semicolons in my lists, so I filter these sorts of things out using a [route]. You can add to this or remove things as needed. As you can see, I'm filtering 59 and 10. Perhaps there's a more efficient way to do this, but this whole patch is a kludge after all!

* I'll let you know if this thing seems to significantly slow things down as I start to prototype my piece.

* Please let me know if anything I've done here can be done better. I've been around the PD block a few times, but I don't consider myself a master by any stretch of the imagination.

Love,

John

http://www.pdpatchrepo.info/hurleur/ascii2list.pd