vl-list->string, hex notation, and oh god why I can't write this string to a file

[Kreaten_vhar]

How's it going everybody?

 

Today I write because I have been banging my head against a wall trying to find out why I can't write the output of a vl-list->string to a text file.

 

I have a list that's equal to (0 1 2), I run that through vl-list->string and get the ASCII codes as a string in the form of "\000\001\002" as the output. So I then save that string to a variable, say, VariableWithString. All good so far.

When I attempt to write this string of ASCII codes to a file using (write-line VariableWithString File) what gets written to the file is just a blank new-line (other write-line statements get written fine.) Not so good now, but I figure I could fix it.

 

Well I can't really figure it out 

At first I figured there was some escape character shenanigans going on, so I tried to append extra \'s to the string. vl-string-translate wasn't able to pick up on the existing \'s however.

I have made some progress, such as noticing that a statement such as (vl-string-translate "0" "/0" VariableWithString) will actually replace the \000 with just a plain 0, but this solution makes later coding a bit more difficult/tedious cause the initial list can vary in size quite a bit. I'd very much like to be able to get the exact string, that whole "\000\001\002" written to the file so I can later just do a quick vl-string->list to get my list back, or at the least a version of the string that I could easily restore to the proper form to get my list back. 

 

And I figure it's worth mentioning I'm on BricsCAD 

 

Thanks ahead of time all for any help/insight you can offer! 
 

[mhupp]

That is a list of integers they need to be converted to strings to be written to a file.

 

(foreach x lst
  (if (numberp x)
    (writeline (rtos x 2 0))
    (writeline x)
  )
)

Edited October 10, 2022 by mhupp
number checking

[Kreaten_vhar]

Oh hey, yeah, that actually works quite well. I was definitely too deep into the vl-list->string rabbithole and wasn't thinking about just breaking down my list into strings using another method lol 

[mhupp]

Trust me iv been there.

[Kreaten_vhar]

We've all been I'm sure lol