How to get a listen event to only happen at intervals?

I want to make a listen even only check for messages every minute or so rather than all the time to make it lag friendly, is there a way to put a listen event inside a timer(0) event?

Bonus Question:

How do you use the not statement for a string
if (signal NOT "" launch=1

How do I best send the following to another object by llWhisper
quantity = 12
color = "red"
item = "pencil"

The only way I can think of that you can get the listen to CHECK for events every once in a while but not MISS any would be by use of llMinEventDelay(), but note that this will affect other events in your script as well (link messages and multiple scripts might be helpful here, but watch out for the limit on queued link messages: 64).

http://www.lslwiki.net/lslwiki/wakka.php?wakka=llMinEventDelay

As for string equality, try the != operator, just like integers, floats, etc. (e.g. signal != "".

Finally, you could either have the receiving script understand that certain places in your message represent certain fields:

// send...
llWhisper(channel, llList2CSV([ quantity, color, item ]));

// ...receive
list params = llCSV2List(text);
integer quantity = (integer)llList2String(params, 0);
string color = llList2String(params, 0);
string item = llList2String(params, 0);

...or you could actually send name/value pairs. For example:

// send...
llWhisper(channel, llList2CSV([ "quantity", quantity, "color", color, "item", item ]));

// parsing and logical handling on the receiving end left as exercise for reader

These are just examples. You may need to handle cases differently depending on your application. For example, llCSV2List() may not work well for you if any of your string values might include commas (,), though they ARE handled automatically by that function for the inside of vector and rotation values. Hopefully it gives you an idea of how to approach the problem though.

you can turn it on a listen with
Handle =llListen(0,"",NULL_KEY,"";

you can turnoff a listen with
llListenRemove(Handle);


NOT is !
if (signal != "" launch=1

the last one i would use llParseString2List and llList2String
llWhisper(1,12 red pencil";

in listen event
list my_list = llParseString2List(message,[" "],["."]);
then pull out your commands with
command1 = (integer)llList2String(my_list,0); //0=12,1=red,2=pencil
command2 = llList2String(my_list,1);
command3 = llList2String(my_list,2);

IMHO, you're trying way too hard to be lag-friendly. Just run a normal listen. There's no way to have it trigger once every so often and still collect the data it needs to trigger, anyway.

Cool thanx, cool help there,I had found most of that in the wiki, but couldn't get my head round quite how to use it or which ways were better. And my whispering data only needs to be listened every 30 seconds or so and there may be a lot of them spread about in the sim on the same transmit channel so don't want to fill that channel with noise that's not needed every 0.1 seconds but then again it might miss the message 90% of the time so probably better to limit the llWhisper than the listens

Except llMinEventDelay(), as I said. It should do exactly that. It just does it for ALL events in the current script.