Removing hex colors from text/string?

[Darqwood]

I went around in circles trying to do the same thing while I was working on the spellcast monitor -- getting "red text" messages into some kind of chat broadcast. The inline color codes are frustrating because the hex seems to be considered part of the string and never gets stripped out no matter what you push it through. My experience was that chat output was dropped completely if the inline color string came from anywhere other than the game code.

It just occurred to me that you might try concatenating some characters onto the beginning of the string, to fool the chat output into bypassing the code. Something like

x\#FF0000The mob starts to cast a powerful effect.

or

//\\#FF0000The mob starts to cast a powerful effect.

It may be that the inline code only gets processed if it's at the beginning of the line, or preceded by a non-alpha character. It wouldn't be pretty but it would at least be something you could reliably send to a chat channel. Not at my game computer right now so I can't test it.

Alternatively, you could come up with a list of known popup text strings including the inline color code, and test for the complete string. Known strings that include the character's name would have to be handled with ##


.