Route Text or Bang from textedit

A max user was having trouble with the textedit object, and asked:

I’m using the textedit object and sometimes it will be empty. When it does this it only outputs text. Is there a way I can identify when its output is only text so I can do 2 different tasks?

This example shows how to detect an empty text output using 2 route objects. A route object, as the name indicates, routes the information it receives based on the first element of its list input. However, if the list is limited to a single element that route is expecting, then route will behave much like a select object, that is sending out a bang on the corresponding outlet. In this example we take advantage of that in order to detect an empty text ouput.