Re: class reference "date" problems
Re: class reference "date" problems
- Subject: Re: class reference "date" problems
- From: has <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 23 Apr 2015 22:58:23 +0100
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- User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.10; rv:31.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/31.6.0
Jean-Christophe Helary wrote:
> What are the recommended books (I'm actually more a book person) ?
> I'd like something that gives a thorough reference for the language
now that I can sort of find my way.
Chris and Stan have already mentioned three titles (I co-wrote the
Apress one); there's also the Peachpit book by Sal Soghoian (current
Automation/AppleScript manager). One of those four would be your best
bet: none of them are perfect - each has its own combination of
strengths and faults - and none cover AppleScript or scriptable
application changes after 10.6 [1].
However, the core language hasn't changed much since then (it got a
built-in library loader in 10.9 (not particularly good, but more than
what it had before), and AppleScript-ObjC integration was more or less
sorted out in 10.10) so they should keep you fairly straight on that.
And for learning AppleScript-ObjC, go get Shane Stanley's books as
already advised.
> >> Here it compiles to:
> >> date "Thursday, May 4, 1961 at 11:30:00"
> >>
> >> (notice the lack of GMT reference, even though I seem to have it
in System preference...)
> >
> > I believe it pulls only from the Full-Date and the Medium-Time, but
you'd have to check to be sure.
>
> That's what it looks like.
AppleScript dates do not support timezone information; they always
assume the local timezone. (Yes, they are rubbish. Ancient classic MacOS
date/time routines, unfortunately.) If you care about timezone info,
you'll need to use Cocoa's NSDate class via the AS-ObjC bridge. Ditto if
you want more flexible 'natural' text parsing than AS's `date <string>`
specifiers support: see NSDateFormatter for that. Best person to ask for
advice here is Shane; in an ideal world someone would've already wrapped
all the technical Cocoa stuff in a nice, native, easy-to-use AppleScript
library, but the AS world is far from ideal so I suspect you'll need to
do it yourself.
One other thing: if you want to construct AppleScript date objects
reliably in a non-locale-dependent way, use the following handler:
on makeDate(y, m, d, hr, min, sec)
set newDate to current date
tell newDate to set {its year, its month, its day, its time} to {y,
m, d, hr * hours + min * minutes + sec}
return newDate
end makeDate
makeDate(2015, 6, 12, 18, 40, 1)
--> date "Friday, 12 June 2015 18:40:01"
> Two more open questions:
>
> 1) is Javascript less of a hassle ?
For what exactly? The JavaScript for Automation (JXA) component
introduced in 10.10 is, broadly speaking, a sack of knackers, and
(unsurprisingly) largely DOA. Its Apple event (application scripting)
and OSA (script attachability) support is ugly, buggy, obfuscated,
defective by design, hopelessly documented, and just a joke compared to
AppleScript's own. And you've limited chance of getting help and
assistance on it, as there's little community support - and what there
is knows nearly nothing about how application scripting actually works -
and almost zero support from the JXA team themselves. JXA's library
loader is also rubbish: weak, underpowered, doesn't work with existing
JS package systems, and conflicts with AppleScript's library system too.
JXA's Cocoa bridge I'm not sure about, but you'd probably as well
looking to third-party JS-Cocoa bridges as those are more mature, more
polished, community led, and developed by folks who aren't afraid to eat
their own dogfood and talk to their users too.
In general terms, the JavaScript language itself isn't great (though the
same can be said of mainstream languages in general), but it has massive
industry, tool, and community support that goes a long way to
compensating for its faults, and has been making steady progress into
server and desktop over the last few years (e.g. see node.js, npm). It's
all a bit chaotic, and no doubt still awful at times, but at least it
has a real live pulse.
> 2) is there an Applescript wiki ?
Nope. No library repository either. Used to be a general script archive
that you could rummage in over at MacScripter, but alas that went titsup
years ago. The vast majority AS knowledge and expertise is passed hand
to mouth via this list and the MacScripter boards; the AS world has
never had a culture of formal code/knowledge reuse and distribution, and
it's a bit late in its lifetime for it to be developing one now. Google
is your friend, in other words[2].
IMO, you'd probably be better looking towards a more popular, better
supported scripting language like Python or Ruby for general scripting,
and just turn to AppleScript when you need to do application automation
stuff. If there's one thing absolutely in the AS's favor, it's that when
you do get stuck on automating a particular application, there's always
someone in the AS community who already knows that app like the back of
their hand and is more than happy to assist. But when it comes to
finding ready-to-use libraries for tasks like parsing human-readable
date strings, every other language in the world absolutely mops the
floor with it.[3]
HTH
has
[1] Unfortunately the market for AS books has rather gone dead since
2010. (I asked Apress a year or two ago about possibility of doing a 4th
edition, but answer was effectively "How's your iOS?")
[2] (If "friend" is the right word for an all-seeing, all-knowing,
all-surveilling, globe-spanning entity that knows more about what you
ate for breakfast than you do.)
[3] e.g. A quick search of the ol' PyPI turns up this:
<https://pypi.python.org/pypi/dateparser>. Haven't tried it myself, but
its github repository is clearly active (always a good sign) and looks
like it'd be worth investigating further.
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