Notecard Question

I didn't see anything in the wiki on this, so here goes. When reading a notecard, is there a way to put in comments without it counting as a line? It's not that important, but I'm writing a fairly long notecard (route information for a touring vehicle) and it would help with the accounting if I could write comments on the side.

Before outputting the line to the screen, just pass it through a filter that deletes everything to the right of and including a "//", it's just a string right? If you have this at the top of your script...

string comments(string message)
{  
    if( llSubStringIndex(message,"//")!=-1 )
    {
    return llDeleteSubString(message,llSubStringIndex(message, "//")-1,llStringLength(message));  
    }
    else        
    {
     return message;
                }           
}
CODE


Then comments(data) will return a string without your comments.

As far as I know, a valid notecard comment starts with #, not //.
I think you can just append # the comment
to the end of your notecard lines and just read the characters from
llGetNotecardLine() until you reach a # and then stop.

To be honest, you can use any "control" character you want really.
You'll be the one parsing the file hehe

I usually parse it out in the dataserver event, something like this:

key handle;
integer lineNo;

...

dataserver(key requested, string data)
{
handle = null_key;
if (data != EOF)
{
if (llStringLength(data) > 0) // not a blank line
if (llSubStringIndex(data, ";" != 0) // not a comment line
{
// process a valid line here
}
++lineNo;
handle = llGetNotecardLine("notecardName",lineNo);
}
else
{
//do end of file activities
}
}

I chose the semicolon to represent a comment line above, but it could be anything of your choosing. You could of course add other filters to this like trimming the line first to skip lines that look blank but have spaces only.

if you use a sentinal value (#,//,;, or anything else you like) and you intend to include comments on their own line as well as trailing comments, it's helpful to strip them out before testing for zero line length

if (~(vIntCommentIndex = llSubStringIndex( noteline, "#" ))){ //-- found a comment?
  noteline = llGetSubString( noteline, 0,  vIntCommentIndex - 1 ); //-- strip it
}
if (llStringLength( noteline )){ //-- anything left?
  //-- use it
}

or somesuch

parsestring works too but it's overkill for this unless you have inline comments (eg trailing data, usually needs a ending sentinal value)

Thanks all!