Some help I can find here ...

[Tahmahal]

Hello,

I don't know if you remember me, I'm a french addon developer, who gets bored bye the non-existing french-addon-developer community
I had an idea I wanted to tell you. Please pardon me if it was already said.

My question is : why the hell doesn't the WoW Lua API allow you to put what you want into a text file which could be created, deleted or edited into the addon repertory ? It could be soooo nice to export data without parsing a .lua SavedVariables file. It could not be used to cheat - what could data stocked in text file do ?

That's what I asked on french UI&Macros forum. I knew the answer before to read it : "Yeah, it could be / No it couldn't be nice. Anyway, no one will bring your idea to the developers here. You have to send it on US forums ...".

Maybe one of you could help me by posting that idea on the US UI&Macros forum ? It would be very nice and it could make the life easier to all people trying to export data from World of Warcraft.

Tahmahal - oh, and : please pardon my deficient english - I try to improve it as much as possible.

[Riokou]

I haven't much experience with addon writing but to me it seems like the current system works well. Instead of manually having to set up a "save file", you just create a list of all variables you want to be saved and WoW will do it for you.

Also, your English seems fine to me.

[Mike-N-Go]

What I did to circumvent this was use a frame, set the text to the var that I wanted to output (in a long string with \n for line breaks etc), and allow the user to cut and paste the output. Works for me.

Check out my addon Trade Secretary: Who Crafts (search for 'printF' and 'wcp' in the main file) that I implemented with the StaticPopupDialogs for how I did this with an edit box. Or you could look at the more-complex-but-pretty CopyChat.lua of Chatter.

This does not create a file, but it gets rid of the need to parse the variable outside of WoW

Hope it helps and is what you are asking for.