I see no way to answer such a vague question...

If you think it's too vague, what else do you think you need to know in order to answer the question? I thought it was pretty straightforward: I specified 4 unique colors in code to use when it processed the data, and that worked; but when I tried to use the actual code as input for the data, the result had 5 colors, when I didn't specify anything different.

Seems as though that's not what's supposed to happen.

i think the code would help. or the "actual code as input" whatever that means.
we dont even know how you specified the colors, what color mode you use, if you use lerpColor for example.
its just not possible to answer that question based on what you told us.

I could send you the code, but you've already got it, since you wrote it for me. I specified the colors in RGB in the code, used some text as data, and the result was what I expected. But then I created a text file with the actual code I was running and used that as the data, and the result had 5 colors, instead of the four I specified.

Very odd…

i wrote it? what post are you talking about?
can you send me the link?

ok, and you used a normal text string as input and that worked. and then you changed the string to the actual code of the sketch and it causes some problems... right?

It wasn't a post; it was code-for-hire that you finished last year for me, so there's no link.

Yes, I used normal text as input for the first sketch output, then created a text file of the sketch code and used that file as the input for the sketch; that's when the problem or bug showed up.

Ah ok, i remember...
still hard to help without seeing the code.
would you please post the part that causes the problem. maybe reduce it to show only the problem...

I don't know what part causes the problem. Why don't I just email you the whole package after 9am in the US, along with the two PDFs of the different results? That's probably the easiest way for you to see what's happening.

thats how debugging works. you remove everything that is not needed and see if the problem still occurs. if it disappears, you might have found the problem.
but its alright. send me the pdfs and code and i will take a look.