I am getting a stream of messages of individual ASCII character values from a comport object.

I would like to combine the messages to form a line of text, perhaps using using the select object to look for a carriage return.

How can I do this easily? (I can imagine a complex line buffer using tabwrite/tabread and an array, but there must be an easier way).

Thanks!

The best way to build up lines may be to grow a list using

.

It's best to treat chars as ints and strings as lists of ints in Pd, rather than using symbols - if you want to do any kind of matching. Be aware that this will depend on your character ser and may not be very portable.

Not much use to you right now (because it wont be included in the main build for some time) but Martin Peach has created a [str] string object to handle many of the problematic issues in Pd that come about from having to treat strings as lists of ints.

Ah yes, I see now you can use

to accumulate messages going into its left input by using a [t l] to feedback the output of into its right input, and clear the accumulation with a [bang>

This is well documented in "example 1: simple rhythmic sequencer".

Thanks!