Subject: From: Date:

Event to speak messages from a text file Martin Terry Sun, 14 Nov 1999 12:19:57 -0800

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ECSers,

Here's another event that I found pretty useful. It is very similar to the
last I posted. Basically I wanted some way for ECS to speak some kind of
informative messages, but I didn't want to have to define dozens of
different text items for this purpose. So I created a single text item
called Msg:Generic that is defined from text files. These files all live in
a directory called d:\msg.
All the files are basically single line ascii text files that are named
numerically (E.G. 1,2,3,4) I have a list of the numbers and the messages
they contain.

Here's the contents of d:\msg\1

There is a new phone message.

So in my phone event I set a numeric item Num:MsgPointer to 1 and call the
event to read the file and speak the message, like so:

|	;Announce phone messages when a message is left
|	If                      Sys:NewPhoneMsgs	Is		1
|	And                  Time:CurrentTime	Is LT		Time:Bedtime
|	Then                 Num:MsgPointer	Set		1
|	Then                 Sys:EventCall		Set
Called:SpeakMsg

And ECS says "There is a new phone message". Here's the event that is
called:

|Event:	Called:SpeakMsg			Called ?:Yes
|	;Dynamically define a Text Message and speak
|	;To use set Num:MsgPointer to the message desired
|	;Then Call Called:SpeakMsg
|
|	If	Num:MsgPointer		Is		0
|	Then	Sys:EventExit		Set		True
|
|	;Setup the path to the message
|	Do	Msg:Generic		T1<-T1		Str:MessagePath
|	Do	Msg:Generic		T1/A<-Stt	Num:MsgPointer
|	Do	File:GenericTxt		T1<-T1		Msg:Blank
|	Do	File:GenericTxt		T1<-T1		Msg:Generic
|	Do	Num:MsgPointer		Set		0
|	Do	File:GenericTxt		Set		Rewind
|	Do	Num:GetChar		Set		0
|	Do	Flg:Loop		Set		True
|	Do	Msg:Generic		T1<-T1		Msg:Blank
|
|	;Loop through and get characters
|	WHILE	Flg:Loop		Is		True
|	Do	Num:GetChar		Set		File:GenericTxt
|	If	Num:GetChar		Is Not		10
|	And	Num:GetChar		Is Not		13
|	And	Num:GetChar		Is Not		256
|	Then	Msg:Generic		Set		Num:GetChar
|	If	Num:GetChar		Is		256
|	Then	Flg:Loop		Set		False
|	ENDWHILE
|
|	;Add a warning chime if desired
|	If	Flg:Chime		Is		False
|	Then	Flg:Chime		Set		True
|	Else	SFX:Announce		Set		Play
|
|	;Speak the message
|	Do	Msg:Generic		Set		Speak
|	Do	Sys:EventExit		Set		True
|	End

Hopefully it is simple enough to follow.

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