TCL escape characters

[fixxorion]

Hi all,

Here's a seemingly simple yet frustrating problem. All I want to do is, from tcl, run the following:

hscript chkey -t 0 -v 0 -m 0 -a 1 -F 'ch("ty")' geo1/tx

But everytime I do this, I get the following in the tx channel:

ch(\"ty\")

This, of course, isn't exactly what I wanted. How do I prevent tcl from including the escape characters when it runs the command? (I assume that's what's happening) Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,

fixxorion

[fixxorion]

I don't think I explained it too well in the last post, so I included an example of what I want to do. This was made with Visual Tcl. Now, this script assumes that you have a geo object called "model" at the object level. When you press the button, I want it to put the following in the ty channel:

ch("/obj/model/tx")

Instead, I get the following:

ch(\"/obj/model/tx\")

This really has me stumped, so any help would be unbelievably appreciated!!

Thanks,

fixxorion

test.tcl

[edward]

Tcl might be taking out the single quotes ... Off the top of my head, try backslashing those. ie.

hscript chkey -t 0 -v 0 -m 0 -a 1 -F \'ch("ty")\' geo1/tx

[fixxorion]

hm....I tried it, but that doesn't work either. Strange...it does seem to be seeing the single quotes either way. Thanks for the help on this...

fixxorion

[Daniel]

Unfortunatly I've found the tcl scripting interface to be prertty problematic in houdini. Some hscript calls in tcl are fine to call as your doing, but any time you want to set a string field it can be a real pain. There are some other pitfalls where you get a {} around your strings and it seems impossible to get rid of them when sending tcl strings directly to houdini though the tcl hcript command

The best way I've found is to simply dump commands like this to a temp file rather then sending the commands directly to houdini.. then at the end of your tcl script source them in and clean up the temp file. Heres's an example:

######################

#Open a temp file

set tempfile "c:/temp"

set fileID [open $tempfile w]

#Dump cmds to it

puts $fileID "opcd /obj"

puts $fileID "chadd -t 0 0 geo1 tx"

puts $fileID "chkey -t 0 -v 0 -m 0 -a 1 -F 'ch(\"tz\")' geo1/tx"

#Close, source and cleanup temp file

close $fileID

hscript source $tempfile

file delete $tempfile

exit

-daniel

[fixxorion]

Daniel,

Thanks so much for the response! That solves my problem! It's rather unfortunate that you can't send the commands directly, but at least there's a way around it.

Cheers,

fixxorion

[Daniel]

no problem. I've brought up some of the issues with the tcl plugin to sesi a long time ago, but it didn't seem very high on thier priority list. I'm of the opinion that if it's in the package it should work well, or be removed. I don't see the reasoning behind having 1/2 working features, it only frustrates users.

d

[danteA]

Daniel, by that standard and this one particular problem, you should tell them to remove tcl/tk support altogether!