Apple

On Feb 22, 2011, at 22:28, louie wrote:

Can I write a script that will have a dialog where I can type in the name and the phone number then press the ok button. After pressing the OK button I want the script to produce a application that is the name of the person. What I want to is automate the manual way I handle the script now.

______________________________________________________________________

Hey Louie,

What I prefer to do with this sort of thing is keep a table in a text file and edit the file via BBEdit (TextWrangler is BBEdit's freeware sibling).

I use the Satimage.osax's 'find text' command with regular expressions to do my lookups, but you can use tools native to Mac OS X.

set lookupTable to "

-------------------------------------------------------------

Christopher Stone, ;(123) 456-78910

James Dean, ;(098) 765-4321

-------------------------------------------------------------

set lookupTable to quoted form of lookupTable

set tableQuery to do shell script "egrep -io \"^[^-,]+\" <<< " & lookupTable

set AppleScript's text item delimiters to "|"

set tableQuery to text items of tableQuery

set AppleScript's text item delimiters to ""

set tableQuery to tableQuery as text

set AppleScript's text item delimiters to return

set tableQuery to text items of tableQuery

set tableQuery to choose from list tableQuery

if tableQuery ≠ false then

set tableQuery to tableQuery as text

set dialNumber to do shell script "egrep " & quoted form of tableQuery & " <<< " & lookupTable

set AppleScript's text item delimiters to ";"

set dialNumber to last text item of dialNumber

end if

This is very quick and dirty and is much easier using the Satimage.osax (or shelling out to Perl, Ruby, or Python). Nevertheless you can do it with pure Applescript.

I don't like to use script applications; I much prefer to use FastScripts, or QuicKeys, or Keyboard Maestro. (FastScripts being my script-runner of choice.)

I usually assign my lookup table a global or app-specific keyboard shortcut, so I can open and edit it with ease.

In the case of a script similar to the above I'll 'read' the text file rather than embed it in the script (unless the lookup table is very static).

Best Regards,

Chris

References:
	>Need your thoughts (From: louie <email@hidden>)