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Newbie Joined: 07 Jan 2002 Posts: 8 Location: USA

Trying to assign a variable a value of @B. Helpfiles claim ~@B will do the trick, but unable to get it working...to duplicate:
#var test ~@B;#show @test
shows nothing.
This works in an alias:
#alias test {say ~@B}
There are ways to get around this I know, just curious if it's a bug.
Thanks,

Jason

GURU Joined: 10 Oct 2000 Posts: 4379 Location: USA

When I do:
#VAR test ~@B

@B is in fact stored in @test. However, since @B is not defined, doing:
#SHOW @test

will display nothing because it expands @test to @B and tries to expand @B but that variable doesn't exist.

You might try looking into the %expand function which lets you specify how much you want a variable to be expanded before returning its contents.

Kjata

Newbie Joined: 07 Jan 2002 Posts: 8 Location: USA

Right, it assigns it the value of variable @B, but this is NOT what I want. I want it to be assigned the string @B.
Prefixing @B by ~ should do this according to help files, and it does when used in an alias, but not in this variable.

Jason

GURU Joined: 10 Oct 2000 Posts: 4379 Location: USA

For me it does exaclty that.

Do you have variable @B defined? Since when you do:
#SHOW @test

it shows nothing, I'm guessing that @B is not defined and thus it displays nothing.

However, it very well maybe that nothing is being assign to @test. To check this just go into the settings editor and look at what appears under the value field of the variable test. When you do:
#VAR test ~@B

there should appear @B, just like it does for me. If this is so, then the problem is that when you try to show the contents of @test it also expands @B, but since it doesn't exists, it just shows nothin. In this case, %expand comes in handy so you can specify how many levels of expansion you want.

If however, for some reason, @B is being saved into @test when you do:
#VAR test ~@B

then that is very strange because that's not what is supposed to happen. Nevertheless, you can still try using:
#VAR test "@B"

which, in any case, would be the "technically" correct syntax since you are using the quotes to mean it is a literal string.

Kjata

Newbie Joined: 07 Jan 2002 Posts: 8 Location: USA

Let me explain a bit more.
When I reference that variable, I want the string @B to be returned, because I want @B to be sent to the mud. My mud uses that code to color-code as Dark Blue. I don't want @B expanded as anything else, for this purpose I do not want it to be a variable.
Did you try the alias I put in my first posting? That is the behavior I am looking for in the variable.

Jason

GURU Joined: 15 Jun 2001 Posts: 654 Location: USA

Whenever @b is in sequence, the parser will try to substitute b in to expand it. You can mess around with expansion settings but that might break other scripts.

I tried
#var test ~@b
and
#var test ~~~@b
of which neither worked :b

But this does:
#var test @~~b

The ~~ is evaluated to ~ when assigning the variable so you have @~b as the value. When it is used in a script, the ~b turns into b so you have final text of @b, exactly what you want.

- Charbal

Novice Joined: 28 Sep 2001 Posts: 45 Location: USA

Ok, I got the expand function to work here

First, I set this:
#VAR test ~@b

Then to show just the @b, use this:
#SHOW %expand(@test,1)

To explain, the 1 tells the expand function to expand the string @test once, which in turn is @b. If you changed it to 2, then it would also expand @b. If you changed it to -1, it would show @test.

I hope this helps you out.

Contain rather than hurt.
Hurt rather than maim.
Maim rather than kill.
Kill rather than be killed.

GURU Joined: 10 Oct 2000 Posts: 4379 Location: USA

A quirk about this is that while
#SHOW %expand(@test, 1)

does display @B,
#EXEC %expand(@test, 1)

tries to expand @test and then @B isntead of sending @B to the MUD as expected. A quick work around for this is to use the %quote function like this:
#EXEC %quote(%expand(@test, 1)

which does send @B to the MUD.

Kjata