Re: Trim space chars from start of line
Re: Trim space chars from start of line
- Subject: Re: Trim space chars from start of line
- From: "Mark J. Reed" <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 25 Jul 2011 17:29:04 -0400
On Mon, Jul 25, 2011 at 5:20 PM, Mark J. Reed
<email@hidden> wrote:
So much unnecessary work! Our old friend "quoted form of" will take care of all the apostrophe-munging if you don't try to turn the string into a Ruby source code literal in addition to making it through the shell:
on stripLeadingWhiteSpace(str)
do shell script "ruby -pe '$_.lstrip!' <<<" & (quoted form of str)
end stripLeadingWhiteSpace
Of course, Ruby, at least in its pre-1.9 C-based form, is not known for its speed. Perl is probably faster:
on stripLeadingWhiteSpace(str)
do shell script "perl -pe 's/^\\s+//' <<<" & (quoted form of str)
end stripLeadingWhiteSpace
Or even good old-fashioned sed:
on stripLeadingWhiteSpace(str)
do shell script "sed 's/^ *//' <<<" & (quoted form of str)
end stripLeadingWhiteSpace
For that matter, the shell itself automatically strips leading whitespace from input lines read with "read", though I wouldn't necessarily trust it to pass everything else through intact:
on stripLeadingWhiteSpace(str)
do shell script "(read line; echo \"$line\") <<<" & (quoted form of str)
end stripLeadingWhiteSpace
--
Mark J. Reed <
email@hidden>
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