Re: String Munging
Re: String Munging
- Subject: Re: String Munging
- From: has <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 23 Jul 2007 20:58:50 +0100
Jon Pugh wrote:
No offence, but vanilla text libraries like SmartString just don't
cut it - they're slow, limited in functionality, and completely
unsuitable for working with Unicode text.
And yet I've been using it successfully for over a decade. I've
tuned the routines where I've noticed they're slow. I've added
functionality as I've needed it, but not much.
Compare with the functionality you get from a good scriptable text
editor or TextCommands - it doesn't come close.
They even work with Unicode text as well as AppleScript does,
Which is to say, pretty awfully. All those 'as string' casts won't
help since the international text type can only represent a subset of
the Unicode character set, and then you've got AS's buggy list-to-
unicode coercion which tends to return truncated results on non-ASCII
characters, and case-change routines that only work for ASCII A-to-Z
characters and nothing else, and so on.
Like I say, I'm not knocking your library specifically, but it builds
on a crap foundation and that inevitably drags it down. I've probably
spent more time trying to create good text libraries for AppleScript
than anyone, and the only one worth a toss is TextCommands - and it's
written in Python. AS's atrocious text handling support is one of the
major reasons I finally upped and learnt another language (Python) in
the first place, and the difference is like night and day.
Regards,
has
--
http://appscript.sourceforge.net
http://rb-appscript.rubyforge.org
http://appscript.sourceforge.net/objc-appscript.html
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