topic Re: fileSearch & fileRandom Limitations in ArcGIS CityEngine Questions

fileSearch & fileRandom Limitations

DevinLavigne — Mon, 15 Mar 2021 19:28:31 GMT

I discovered today that fileSearch and fileRandom will not return a result if there is a space in the path.

For example print(fileRandom(/Project Name/*.*)) will not work but print(fileRandom(/DifferentProjectName/*.*)) does. I renamed my project but it broke a ton of references in other places. Is there a way to get around this limitation?   or chr(32)...something like that?

Re: fileSearch & fileRandom Limitations

DavidWasserman — Sun, 11 Apr 2021 23:29:12 GMT

It is incredible how much of rule design is just filename management.

Re: fileSearch & fileRandom Limitations

CherylLau — Wed, 16 Jun 2021 16:24:24 GMT

This is actually not a bug. Whitespace inside the searchQuery string in fileSearch/filesSearch indicates AND in the query. Using whitespace, two or more queries can be AND-ed. See the last example in the doc.

https://doc.arcgis.com/en/cityengine/latest/cga/cga-file-search-function.htm

The same applies to other functions which use fileSearch: assetApproxRatio, assetApproxSize, assetBestRatio, assetBestSize, assetFitSize, fileRandom, imageApproxRatio, imageBestRatio

In order to put whitespace into a filepath, use single quotes:

filesSearch("'Wall Textures/*.png'")

Alternatively, the escape characters \s and \x20 also work to replace a space. Note that an extra backslash is needed so the cga compiler interprets it correctly (instead of as a normal backslash).

filesSearch("Wall\\sTextures/*.png") filesSearch("Wall\\x20Textures/*.png")