Apple

Maybe Ed's off for the weekend. I might try to concoct a perly using Hamish's regex just to test that opinion.

Meantime, I've put an AppleScript and Tcl solution here:

<http://homepage.mac.com/philip_aker/dl/code/TestISBN.zip>

I test with:

# time osascript asisbn.scpt

and

# time tclsh tclisbn.tcl

What I'd appreciate is some independent confirmation that the two HTML output files look the same in Safari and some timing results from a different setup.

Below are some results. I've chopped off the first two calls from each because both osascript and tclsh have first-run overhead after a restart and it was unfair to osascript to consider it's longer first-run startup penalty. As anyone can probably verify, after the handicap, osascript consistently takes an order of magnitude greater amount of time to produce the same result.

[Desktop]# time osascript asisbn.scpt

real 0m0.410s

user 0m0.265s

sys 0m0.037s

[Desktop]# time osascript asisbn.scpt

real 0m0.403s

user 0m0.264s

sys 0m0.035s

[Desktop]# time osascript asisbn.scpt

real 0m0.406s

user 0m0.264s

sys 0m0.036s

[Desktop]# time osascript asisbn.scpt

real 0m0.406s

user 0m0.265s

sys 0m0.036s

[Desktop]# time osascript asisbn.scpt

real 0m0.406s

user 0m0.265s

sys 0m0.036s

[Desktop]# time osascript asisbn.scpt

real 0m0.405s

user 0m0.264s

sys 0m0.035s