Re: Best practices for creating and comparing lists of text?
Re: Best practices for creating and comparing lists of text?
- Subject: Re: Best practices for creating and comparing lists of text?
- From: Christopher Nebel <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 15 Dec 2005 19:27:17 -0800
On Dec 15, 2005, at 8:47 AM, Brian Arnold wrote: I am working on two AppleScript scripting problems with text and lists that seem to be related. ... Here is some sample code for both problems. ...
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to {"="} set currentLine to currentLine as list set AppleScript's text item delimiters to savedTextItemDelimiters set moduleName to item 1 of currentLine-- DOESN’T WORK set libraryName to item 2 of currentLine-- DOESN’T WORK The key problem is that "as list" doesn't do what you think it does. While it's true that "some_list as string" will join the list items together using the "text item delimiters" value, "some_string as list" does not split the string apart -- it merely makes a one-item list with that string value. What you want to say is "every text item of some_string". If your delimiter is return, then it's often more correct -- not to mention shorter -- to say "every paragraph of some_string" instead, because "every paragraph" is line-ending-agnostic -- it treats Mac-, Windows-, and Unix-style line breaks equivalently.
Incidentally, the technical term for your second problem, identifying the items that are in one list or the other, but not both, is "symmetric set difference". This may help you track down a suitable algorithm.
--Chris Nebel
AppleScript and Automator Engineering
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