Reading from a notecard

[Jade Tachikawa]

Hi there,

 

I've not done much scripting for ages but I'm working on an text emoter hud at the moment and want to read some quite long strings from a notecard into a list. What is the best way of doing that? Doing it with comma delimited on a single line looks awful for formatting.

 

Jade

[panterapolnocy]

Check http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/LlGetNotecardLine#Examples for a working example that may help with your idea - instead of reading one string and treating it as CSV just read line after line; Each one would be a new record you'd be able to put into a list. Also, remember that "if the requested line is longer than 255 bytes the dataserver will return the first 255 bytes of the line."

Edited August 16, 2021 by panterapolnocy

[Quistess Alpha]

6 hours ago, Jade Tachikawa said:

quite long strings

If your strings are very long, and you have more than 100~500 of them, it may be wise to let them sit in the notecards and only read them when you need them.(even tho there's the 1 second delay per line. . ..) Script memory is limited and lists of long strings tend to eat it quickly.

ETA: sorry for the tangent, but in doing some memory tests I noticed that lists with repeated content actually have some sort of basic lossless compression going on:

Quote

list l;

string strRand(integer len)
{
    string ret;
    while(~--len)
    {   ret+=llChar((integer)llFrand(0x5E)+32);
    }
    return ret;
}

default
{
    state_entry()
    {
        integer i;
        integer f = llGetFreeMemory();
        while(f>1000)
        {
            f = llGetFreeMemory();
            ++i;
            //string s = strRand(255); // can only store a bit over 100 of these.
            //string s = "this is a constant string of some length that LSL might do some compression on when multiple consecutive copies are stored into a list, which is kinda cool.";
            string s = llList2String(
            [   "These are alternating strings, used as a test due to the previous result. . .",
                "Which saw that the same string stored over and over again only used 4 bytes per copy."
            ],i&1); // this also leads to efficient storage.
            
            l+=s;
            llOwnerSay((string)llGetListLength(l)+" : "+(string)f+" : \n"+s);
        }
    }
}

*quoted for collapsability.

 

Edited August 16, 2021 by Quistess Alpha

[Mollymews]

13 hours ago, Jade Tachikawa said:

Hi there,

 

I've not done much scripting for ages but I'm working on an text emoter hud at the moment and want to read some quite long strings from a notecard into a list. What is the best way of doing that? Doing it with comma delimited on a single line looks awful for formatting.

 

Jade

a way to do this is by using a line concatenate symbol in the notecard. A plus character for example:
 

This is a long string of up to 255 characters.
+ We want to add this line to the previous read line
+ and this one as well.
Here is the next string
+ with this bit added to it.
This string has no following notecard line concantenated.
Nor does this one.
But this one does
+ because the first character of this notecard line is the concatenate symbol.

[Qie Niangao]

20 hours ago, Jade Tachikawa said:

Doing it with comma delimited on a single line looks awful for formatting.

If long enough it won't work: llGetNotecardLine() silently truncates at 255 characters.

[Da5id Weatherwax]

22 hours ago, Mollymews said:

a way to do this is by using a line concatenate symbol in the notecard. A plus character for example:
 

This is a long string of up to 255 characters.
+ We want to add this line to the previous read line
+ and this one as well.
Here is the next string
+ with this bit added to it.
This string has no following notecard line concantenated.
Nor does this one.
But this one does
+ because the first character of this notecard line is the concatenate symbol.

I'd do it by ENDING the line with a character that indicates a continuation follows, because that will cope with both "read the whole nc and eat lots of memory" approaches and "read it when needed" approaches - so that the script knows to stop reading a "line" when it encounters one without the extension character at the end.

 

(yes, old unix guy used to escaping newlines with a \ to make my scripts more readable)

[Mollymews]

22 minutes ago, Da5id Weatherwax said:

I'd do it by ENDING the line with a character that indicates a continuation follows, because that will cope with both "read the whole nc and eat lots of memory" approaches and "read it when needed" approaches - so that the script knows to stop reading a "line" when it encounters one without the extension character at the end.

i like, as is more efficient. We don't have to read the next line to find out if it is to be concatenated