Hi,

this might be a dumb question, but I can't get msgfile to write a text file. Whenever I send it a message [write whatever.txt(, it will only give me this message:

msgfile : failed to open whatever.txt

and it does not create the file.

I tried the same thing with [textfile] and [qlist], they do create the files, and if I add some content, then do a debug printout, these contents show up; however, if open an external text editor, they don't; and most notably, if I close the patch containing the qlist object, the data is lost.

I suppose there is a way to actually save a textfile (so I can have pd write something into it and e.g. look the file up with an external text editor) , but I am unable to find it. Could someone please help me out?

Your help is, as usual, much appreciated.

In both cases, make sure you have added content to the objects before writing to a file. The [write( message doesn't put the object in "write mode", which is what I think you are expecting. It just takes whatever the object currently has stored via the [add( message and writes (i.e. saves) them to a file. The reason why you only get that error from [msgfile] is because it doesn't like creating empty text files.

Sorry, but I did add contents before sending the write message.

I've attached a patch that produces an error message for me:
msgfile : failed to open file.txt

I hope you can tell what I did wrong, but it's not that I expect msgfile to write an empty textfile.

Thanks so far...

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

Your patch works perfectly fine for me. Maybe you have a permissions issue? Or try saving to another directory? I don't know, not really sure where to go from there. :-/

hmm... I had the same issue with msgfile on OSX. I got it to work with textfile though, and I could open the generated file with an external editor.

seems like a bug? I don't know why writing should work with textfile and not msgfile...

edit: just submitted a bug report http://sourceforge.net/p/pure-data/bugs/1089/

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

[msgfile] writes an emty textfile and crash pd on my mashine.
[textfile] woks for me.

it turns out you need to supply an absolute filename to msgfile because it tries to open the file in the process directory and the user may not have write permissions there