Apple

On Aug 24, 2005, at 1:07 PM, Michelle Steiner wrote:

On Aug 24, 2005, at 9:57 AM, Daniel Jalkut wrote:

Have you ever wished you could easily select a bunch of items in the Finder by regular _expression_? You're looking at a huge directory full of files and you want to select all the items whose name end in ".jpg" and contain "Fun"?

This can be done with vanilla Applescript.

tell application "Finder"
files of entire contents of startup disk whose name contains "Fun" and name extension is "jpg"
end tell

Hi Michelle - I didn't realize that the Finder's built-in matching was as quick and relatively useful as it is. Thanks for that!

But the big advantage of being able to search by regular _expression_ is that you don't have to write the script every time. You just have to write the _expression_. I'm not as likely to take the time to write a complete script for a one-off operation like this.

Also, regular expressions make it easy to express more complicated queries like "ends in jpg or jpeg and contain a series of three capital letters followed by a numeral." I'm almost positive you can't put that into words that AppleScript can easily understand.

By the way, a regex for that is "[A-Z]{3}[0-9]{1}.*jpg|jpeg"

Daniel

References:
	>Select Finder items by Regular Expression (From: Daniel Jalkut <email@hidden>)
	>Re: Select Finder items by Regular Expression (From: Michelle Steiner <email@hidden>)