@whale-av all of your examples with iem_pbank_scv will load in the first half of the symbol "variablename1" but when it gets to the space it cuts off the floating point i need, "4.0"

@rjpg i've been trying to use qlist to read in floating points from a .txt file. The txt file looks like this:
variablename1 4.0;
variablename2 3.2;
variablename3 659.0;
etc.....

in order to read in any of these values, qlist requires me to make an object like [r variablename1] and output the value 4.0 from there

which works, for this one abstraction, but if i wish to use multiples of the same abstraction in the same patch, the [r variablename1] objects need to be localized.
My initial thought was, write "$0-variablename1 4.0;" to the .txt file instead of "variablename1 4.0;" however, a [r $0-variablename1] object just flat out don't work.

So my other thoughts were

1. is there a way to just load in as a symbol "variablename1"?
   which appears to require slist and iem_pb but seems unnecessarily complicated
   or
2. can i create an [r symbol] like instance that will allow me to import from qlist the number 4.0 if i pass it the symbol "variablename1"?

whatimtalkinbout.pd

perhaps this will show you EXACTLY what i would like to do? could you possibly edit this patch so it works?

sorry but i'm still not clear as to how you could use a symbol as the name of a send and receive line. how can you create an object like [s NAME] where NAME is a symbol you generate on the fly?

nice! i thought about that idea too for a bit, the concept of pure data metaprogramming. i believe you could also do such a thing by creating the .pd file with c++ possibly? or perl? possibly? from there, the .pd file created could communicate back to the creating perl or c++ file with a .txt file of data... an idea i had, feel free to explore it OBV........ though this has probably been done before?

i'll check it out. Thank you!

cool, it's pulling in most of the data but for some reason the ends of the lines are getting cut off. For example "pieceofdata 1;" loses the "1" and the ";" any idea as to why that might be?

I didn't want to have to explain the full extent of my problem for fear of confusion, but here goes: basically I'm writing a text file with a name and data that is procedurally generated by symbols and floats. This way I can create duplicate files to read multiple pieces of information into multiple copies of the same abstraction without having to manually rewrite the name for each one ("piece of data 1" piece of data 2" etc)
Now to read that data back, I need to use a read function that will use the same names procedurally generated as the data input readouts, but, using [qlist] (as well as [slist]) requires a s "name" and r "name".
You can't generate send and receive names from a symbol.
Or can you?

i hope that made any sense, thanks for sticking with me!

@whale-av wow! thanks for the effort! Is there anyway to do this without slist, though?

sorry for being suck a picky pain in the ass... I just can't use slist in this scenario

I can't get pbank to load from a .txt file, and to make matters stranger, I've searched my puredata folder and I can't even find this file [read iem_pbank.pbank br] that the example help file supposedly accesses...