Writing Multiple lines of text to a text file

I had a quick question in regards to writing lines of text to a text file. The end goal is that I am modifying Lee Mac's layer director file found at http://www.lee-mac.com/layerdirector.html so that based on the user's settings, it will read the commands for the reactor to work on from either the default in the LISP, or a user defined txt file that would be saved on their computer. The routine would automatically write the text file to the default location (i.e. C:\\), and then the user could enter in their defaults in the txt file. I understand the basic concept of how to do this, but I have difficulties in trying to write multiple lines as well as how to write the ";" character because AutoCAD keeps recognizing this as commented out. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Can you post what you have so far?

Does this help?

(setq fn "C:\\temp\\output.txt"
     fp (open fn "w")
)
(princ "line 1" fp)
(princ "\nline 2" fp)
(princ "\nline 3" fp)
(princ (strcat "\n" (chr 59) " comment" ) fp)
(close fp)
(startapp "notepad" fn)

The resulting text file =

line 1
line 2
line 3
; comment

Can you post what you have so far?

 

Does this help?

 

(setq fn "C:\\temp\\output.txt"
     fp (open fn "w")
)
(princ "line 1" fp)
(princ "\nline 2" fp)
(princ "\nline 3" fp)
(princ (strcat "\n" (chr 59) " comment" ) fp)
(close fp)
(startapp "notepad" fn)

The resulting text file =

line 1
line 2
line 3
; comment

(princ "\n;;                   |                |     Use "" for none     |              |              |  0 <= int <= 211 |  0 = Won't Plot  |  Use nil for CTB ;;" file_open)

The issue is that I have "" in the center portion of it. I cannot figure out what chr value is used for the quotation, which I am trying to use with strcat.

So after looking into a help book I have, I found out the issue. I didn't know that LISP recognized ASCII characters using the chr function. A list of these characters can be found http://www.ascii.cl/htmlcodes.htm for anyone in the future.

Page 237 & 238 in your Autocad Release 12 Autolisp Programmers manual

(setq ans (Getstring "\nEnter single keyboard character"))
(Alert (strcat "For " ans " the code number is " (rtos (ascii ans) 2 0)))

(setq x (Getint "\nEnter single keyboard number"))
(Alert (strcat "For " (rtos x 2) " the alpha code is " (chr x)))

Page 237 & 238 in your Autocad Release 12 Autolisp Programmers manual

 

(setq ans (Getstring "\nEnter single keyboard character"))
(Alert (strcat "For " ans " the code number is " (rtos (ascii ans) 2 0)))

(setq x (Getint "\nEnter single keyboard number"))
(Alert (strcat "For " (rtos x 2) " the alpha code is " (chr x)))

(princ "\n;;                   |                |     Use \"\" for none     |              |              |  0 

(princ "\n;;                   |                |     Use \"\" for none     |              |              |  0 
Thanks Lee! So the \ has LISP ignore the "?

Thanks Lee! So the \ has LISP ignore the "?

The single backslash is an Escape Character in AutoLISP; see here for more.