Re: push/pop text item delimiters
Re: push/pop text item delimiters
- Subject: Re: push/pop text item delimiters
- From: Bill Briggs <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 29 Jun 2004 22:31:34 -0300
At 1:36 AM +0100 30/06/2004, Nigel Garvey wrote:
I thought of this a few years ago, but was firmly sat upon when I
presented it here (or possibly on MACSCRPT). The thing is that the
AppleScript Language Guide states that multiple delimiters might be
implemented at some point in the future. That's why 'delimiters' is
plural and why the default setting's a list - for future expansion.
The old Scriptable Text Editor from years ago did support its own
multiple TIDs, but only when getting the text items of a block of
text. When reassembling the text it used the current delimiter from
AppleScript itself. It was supposed to use the first one in its list,
but I never found any syntax that made that work. The other odd thing
is that AppleScript's TIDs can be a longish character string (not
sure what the upper bound is, but it's many dozens), but Scriptable
Text Editor's multiple TIDs support only allowed delimiters of 2
characters length. You could, for example, assign as follows:
tell application "Scriptable Text Editor" to set its text item
delimiters to {";;;;", "::::", "~~~~"}
and when you asked for the TIDs you would get {";;", "::", "~~"}
back. And that's all it used, the first two chars of each entry.
There's been no other sign that multiple delimiters ever will happen -
and it's not clear how they'd be interpreted if they were.
Possibly due to the "which one to use on reassembly" issue.
Certainly it's not difficult to implement technically.
But if they ever should come into being, a script that uses the
delimiter list as its own stack will start producing some very
creative results!
That's for sure. Maintaining backward compatibility would be a
definite problem if one were to accommodate the approach that started
this thread.
- web
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