\n \t in Notecard Data

heyas;

so... string line = "\n\t blah blah" translates to 'blah blah' on a new line with a tab in front of it. great!

now i put a buncha strings in notecards with \n and \t codes. and when i do
string line = data.... it comes out as '\n\t blah blah'

this is not fun.

when i do string line = data; string realline = line. it doesnt get rid of the \n\t codes.


apparently, i have to write a function to replace \n with... um... \n and \t with \t. recursively until they're all replaced. uh...

okay, i admit, i'm stumped as to how to do that
any ideas? is there a utf code for newline and/or tab i can stick in and then use llescapeurl or unescapeurl or whichever it is?

heyas;

for a while i thought i'd have to go through my notecards and use custom codes. but... i discovered it could find \\ (and/or \\n and \\t) in the notecard line data so....

this function fixes it.

//--FORMAT NTs------------------------------------------------------
string formatNT(string s)
{
    string front; string back;
    while(llSubStringIndex(s, "\\n") != -1)
    {
     front = llGetSubString(s, 0, llSubStringIndex(s, "\\n")-1);
     back = "\n"+llGetSubString(s, llSubStringIndex(s, "\\n")+2, llStringLength(s));
     s = front+back; 
    }
    
    while(llSubStringIndex(s, "\\t") != -1)
    {
     front = llGetSubString(s, 0, llSubStringIndex(s, "\\t")-1);
     back = "\t"+llGetSubString(s, llSubStringIndex(s, "\\t")+2, llStringLength(s));
     s = front+back; 
    }
      
    
     return s; 
    
}

This is often a source of frustration in other programming languages too. Basically, when you use "\n" or "\t" in a string in your script, it's not actually stored as "backslash n" or "backslash t"... the compiler converts it to the appropriate ASCII character for "newline" or "tab". In the same way, the compiler converts "\\" to just a single backslash character. Obviously text you read in from a notecard isn't compiled, so the characters never get converted.

When I've read a string from a Notecard this works for me...

string = llDumpList2String(llParseStringKeepNulls(string, ["\\n"], []), "\n";
string = llDumpList2String(llParseStringKeepNulls(string, ["\\t"], []), "\t";

Bloodsong, that bit of code is going to send you into a world of hurt when you try to use the "\\" escape code in a string like "\\new\\"

Fortunately I wrote a function to deal with this problem some time ago... but it's too much work for me to get at it right now so I wrote a new one ^_^ you can find it here:
http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Combined_Library#Unescape