Pull data from text file?

1

I would like to use stored data on text files as the source for note sequences. So rather than having arrays inside a Pseq:

Pbind(\instrument, \mysynthdef, \freq, Pseq([120, 200, 333, 88, 120, 300], inf), \dur, 0.3).play;

I could pull those dynamically from a text file containing ONLY the corresponding values, comma separated:

120, 200, 333, 88, 120, 300

I looked into File and saw File.use expects a function, but i guess putting a Pbind there is no good (or rather I did not know how to do that, supposing that’s possible).

Thank you!

2

Habe a look at
http://doc.sccode.org/Classes/CSVFileReader.html
and the examples there

cheers,
eddi
https://alln4tural.bandcamp.com

1 Like
3

Pretty cool, although I encountered some problems, surely my bad.

  1. I get a nil after each line. Perhaps where carriage returns are? Does it matter if the file was made on Windows/Mac/Linux? I think different OSs deal with new lines differently. Not sure if this is in anyway related to this.
    I thought those arguments (true, true) for skipEmptyLines and skipBlanks would actually help there, but i keep getting those “nil” after each line. Is there a way to make it ignore everything that’s not commas or numbers?

  2. If i get it correctly, it creates a 2-dimensional array. I tried flattening it with .flat which of course removes the square brackets but I still get those nils for each of the brackets (i think?).

Now I’m at:

~my = CSVFileReader.readInterpret("/Users/nix/Desktop/text/aa.txt", true, true).flat.postln;

THANK YOU ALL

4

hi Nixie,
i guess this depends a lot on what exactly is in your file.
if i create it as below (adapted from the help examples), it works as i’d expect

(
// write a test file:
f = File("aa.txt", "w");
f.write("120, 200, 333, 88, 120, 300");
f.close;
)
~my = CSVFileReader.readInterpret("aa.txt", true, true).flat.postln;
-> [ 120, 200, 333, 88, 120, 300 ]
1 Like
5

Right, cause there are no line breaks there, I believe. As soon as you introduce line breaks, CSVFileReader gives you nils, from what I’ve been testing.

6

ok, that must be due to how you’re creating the file, or, as you said, your OS (i’m on windows currently)

if i create the file with line breaks like this


(
// write a test file:
f = File("aa.txt", "w");
f.write("
120, 200, 333, 88, 120, 300
120, 200, 333, 88, 120, 300
120, 200, 333, 88, 120, 300
");
f.close;
)

i don’t get any nils.

anyway, if it’s just the nils specifically, you can reject them like this:

~my = ~my.reject(_.isNil)

// or one time:
~my = CSVFileReader.readInterpret("aa.txt", true, true).flat.reject(_.isNil).postln;

// edit: or slightly more generally
~my = CSVFileReader.readInterpret("aa.txt", true, true).flat.reject(_.isNumber.not).postln;

// edit2: or slightly more elegantly
~my = CSVFileReader.readInterpret("aa.txt", true, true).flat.select(_.isNumber).postln;
3 Likes