String Oddity

Okay, here's something that struck me as odd, and I'm hoping someone can tell me a simple reason why it's working oddly.

This is in relation to a simple "HUD scanner" script... the kind that once a second scans for avatars in the area and shows a list of them, using float text, above an invisible prim attached to a HUD point. There's nothing mysterious about this; these things have been around forever. What is mystifying me is this:

For my purposes, the float text needs to always start at a certain height on the screen, and the list grows downwards as more people are added to it. That's fairly straightforward. If I use a loop to add newline characters to pad out the string for the float text, it works fine. If instead of a loop I use llGetSubString to take a piece of a string containing nothing but newline characters and tack it on to the end of the string for the float text... they don't show up. But if that same string is displayed another way (via, say, llOwnerSay) the blank spacing newlines show up!

This has me scratching my head.

Here's the script:

string spacer = "\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n";

default
{
    state_entry()
    {
        llSetText("",<0,0,0>,1);
        llSensorRepeat("",NULL_KEY,AGENT,96,PI,1);
    }
    
    link_message(integer sender, integer num, string msg, key id)
    {
        if (msg == "sensor off") 
        {
            llSensorRemove();
            llSetText("",<0,0,0>,1);
        }
        else if (msg == "sensor on")
        {
            llSensorRepeat("",NULL_KEY,AGENT,96,PI,1);
        }   
    }
      
    sensor(integer num_detected)
    {
        string title = "";
        integer distance;
        integer x;
        integer count = 0;
        
        if ( num_detected > 12 )
        {
            num_detected = 12;
        }
        
        for( x = 0; x < num_detected ; x++ )
        {
            distance = llFloor(llVecDist(llGetPos(),llDetectedPos(x)));
            if ( distance < 96 )
            {
                title += (string)llDetectedName(x)+" ("+(string)distance+"m)\n";
                count ++;
            }
        }
        
       // title = title + llGetSubString(spacer, count, 12);

       // To see the odd behavior, comment out the following line and un-comment the prior line

        for( x = count; x < 13 ; x ++ ) title = title + " \n";
         
        llSetText(title,<1,1,1>,1);
    }
    
    no_sensor()
    {
        llSetText("",<1,1,1>,1);    
    }
}

It's probably because the \n character is strange in LSL. According to Argent Stonecutter in a recent thread:



He was talking about notecards with \n in them, but your problem might be similar.

No, it's actualyl a different issue.

llSetText has a quirk, and so does the script.

From The Wiki



In your script, your loop uses the correct string with a space and a newline, but your spacer global string variable is just a bunch of newlines. As such, it won't work the same, because of the quirk with llSetText.

[there is a loud slap as Solomon facepalms himself]

Doggone it, I completely forgot about that, and today had missed seeing the space I'd inserted there when I intially wrote the loop a while back.

[sigh]

Thanks guys... just my own blindness at work...