Hi,
I have a menu that I've made and after the menu displays the menus display instructions have it display the message area and group. The thing is that
my message group is long enough that it bites into the graphic part of my
ansi. Is there any way I can limit the outputted length of the display of
the name of the message area?

Thanks for your help.

Best regards,
warmfuzzy

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A34 (Linux/64)
* Origin: PHATstar RetroBOX! (21:2/113)

On 08/21/17, warmfuzzy pondered and said...

Hi,
I have a menu that I've made and after the menu displays the menus
display instructions have it display the message area and group. The thing is that my message group is long enough that it bites into the graphic part of my ansi. Is there any way I can limit the outputted length of the display of the name of the message area?

So you are talking about limiting the length of a menu prompt - correct?

What about using Input Field Manipulation Codes to do this?

From the docs

[snip]

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
A.6 Input Field Manipulation Codes
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Input field codes effect the next input field of its type, and are
generally used in prompt strings that are send prior to asking the user
for input.

-N - Forces the next Yes/No prompt to default to a No answer
-Y - Forces the next Yes/No prompt to default to a Yes answer
IF - Turns off the input field background color for the next input
prompt.
IN## - Sets the scrolling input field size for the next input prompt to
## characters. If the maximum size of the input field is larger
than this, Mystic will scroll the text inside so that it can
accept more characters without taking up more than ## on screen.
IS## - Limits the actual maximum number of characters allow for an
input prompt to ## characters.

[snip]

That may do the trick, if I'm understanding what you want correctly.

Best, Paul

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A34 (Windows/32)
* Origin: Agency BBS | telnet://agency.bbs.geek.nz (21:1/101)

On 08/21/17, warmfuzzy said the following...

length of the display of the name of the message area?

Yea there is a pipe code that will limit the string length

|$Lxx (Left pad the string to XX chars)
|$Rxx (Right pad the string to XX chars)

So lets say your message base has 35 characters but you only have room to display 30 of them, you would use ^$L30^MB (replace ^ with | character I changed it for security measures in case some systems translate pipe codes)

same with message group ^$L30^MG

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A34 (Windows/32)
* Origin: internal dimension + idbbs.dlinkddns.com + port 59 (21:1/178)

On 08/21/17, Night Stalker said the following...

On 08/21/17, warmfuzzy said the following...

length of the display of the name of the message area?

Yea there is a pipe code that will limit the string length

|$Lxx (Left pad the string to XX chars)
|$Rxx (Right pad the string to XX chars)

You do not want to do this as it would not work well with other systems, its really unknown if any other system uses a display code like the one above.

Cheers!
Pequito

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A34 (Linux/32)
* Origin: Twinkle BBS # (21:1/126)

On 08/21/17, Pequito said the following...

You do not want to do this as it would not work well with other systems, its really unknown if any other system uses a display code like the one above.

I think he wanted it for his message base headers and index to truncate the base name cuz if there was one that was too long it ate into the ANSI of the header

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A34 (Windows/32)
* Origin: internal dimension + idbbs.dlinkddns.com + port 59 (21:1/178)