Quake c string

Quake C strings are one of the primitive types of Quake C. They are zero-terminated sequences of characters (meaning a series of ascii letters). Vanilla quake c offers no straightforward ways to modify a string once it is created and no way to combine existing strings into a new string.

In quake-c code, double quotation marks delimit the start and end of a string.

local string myString = "The Rune of Black Magic throbs evilly in your hand";

Escape Charaters

Much like the C programming language, strings in QuakeC have escape characters:

character	result
\n	new line
\"	"
\0	unknown
{{	{
}}	}

Substitution

String substitution can be used when outputting text to the screen as in the following snippet:

local float msg_type = MSG_ONE; //could be broadcast etc

msg_entity = self.owner;

WriteByte(msg_type,SVC_PRINT); // SVC_CENTERPRINT etc

WriteShort(msg_type, 2); // 2 is the number of following arguments

WriteString(msg_type, "Player name: {}\n" );

WriteString(msg_type, self.owner.netname ); //substitute in player name where the {} was above

Uses

In Quake-C strings are used for

• FileNames
  • precache_model ("progs/wizard.mdl");
• text output
  • sprint (self, "not enough ammo.\n");
• identifiers
  • if (self.classname == "monster_ogre")
• lighting
  • lightstyle(1, "mmnmmommommnonmmonqnmmo");
• commands
  • stuffcmd (other, "bf\n");
• cvars
  • timelimit = cvar("timelimit") * 60;
• find
  • le2 = find( le1, target, "lightning");

Trivia

Searching through the existing entities in the world of quake can be done by strings

Strings can be printed/output to screen with a number of different methods

The maximum length of a string is 2048 characters

see also:

ftos creates a string from a floating point number

vtos creates a string representation of a vector

WriteString - sends a string to the quake engine