Thanks, Paul -- for the lesson and for the fix!
Chastisement taken, too. I guess I should quell your fears at least a
little -- this particular script was heavily borrowed from elsewhere, I just
tweaked the output. I do know about ATIDS, I was just unaware that they
only stick while the application that ran them is still running. And I
didn't know the part about the concatenation to lists vs. strings part. I
had no idea on that one, thanks.
I must admit that I've become much more fond of perl in the last couple
years and grown more annoyed with AS, for this very reason! I did try to
build this script, but I couldn't get what I wanted from it in a reasonable
amount of time. Why is "&" able to return lists *and* strings? Where is it
documented that you can request the month of a date as an integer? The
month of the current date is "October", how does AS coerce that into an
integer? More generally, unreliable globals, properties that don't always
stick, and English-like syntax that usually isn't, make AS pretty difficult
when perl is available. Of course none of this is your fault -- just a
source of frustration for me.
Thanks again.
- Bryan
> You've recently run a script that set AppleScript text item delimiters to
> {return}, and your own script does not set them to {""} before coercing a
> list to text ('as string'). That is a VERY big no-no. Never omit that.
>
> This script is simply full of careless things that show a lack of
> understanding of AppleScript. I'm afraid.
>
> This actually proves the point that you can never trust others to reset
> delimiters so you should always, always set them to what you want before
> coercing a list to string or Unicode text.
>
> AppleScript's text item delimiters are global across the application running
> the script(s), until you quit and relaunch it. In the case of scripts run
> from the Entourage script menu, that means Entourage itself. So running a
> script form the Script menu which sets tids to {return} will leave them that
> way for all other scripts run from the menu until you quit and relaunch.
> Therefore it's polite to always reset them to {""} - or to what they were.
> And it's essential to set your own before coercing lists to strings.
>
> Now you may think you're not using a list anywhere. But you are.
>
> You have the line:
>
> if mo < 10 then copy "0" & mo as string to mo
>
> OK, what happens when mo � 10? Nothing - it remains an integer - you have
> not coerced it to string. Then later, when you have:
>
>
> copy (mo & "/" & da & "/" & yr as text) to theTxt
>
>
> The first element (mo) is integer and the rest of the items, beginning with
> "/", are strings. You can always begin a concatenation expression with a
> string followed by an integer, e.g.
>
> "/" & 10
> --> "/10"
>
>
> since the integer will get coerced implicitly to the class on the left
> (string) , since it _can_ be. But when you write
>
> 10 & "/"
> --> {10, "/"}
>
> you get a list, since the item on the right cannot be implicitly coerced to
> an integer. All this is in the AppleScript Language Guide. Thus, on today's
> date
>
> (mo & "/" & da & "/" & yr )
> --> {10, "/", 24, "/", "04"}
>
> There's your list. Since you have tids set to {return} when you then coerce
> this list - at last - to text, you get:
>
> copy (mo & "/" & da & "/" & yr as text) to theTxt
> -->"10
> /
> 24
> /
> 04"
>
>
>
> tell application "Microsoft Entourage"
>
> set AppleScript's text item delimiters to {""}
> copy ((offset of (the month of (current date)) in �
> "jan feb mar apr may jun jul aug sep oct nov dec ") + 3) / 4 �
> as integer to mo
> if mo < 10 then copy "0" & mo as string to mo
> copy day of (current date) to da
> copy text 3 thru 4 of (get year of (current date) as text) to yr
> if (day of (current date) < 10) then copy "0" & da as string to da
>
> copy (mo & "/" & da & "/" & yr as text) to theTxt
>
> try
> set selection to theTxt
> on error
> display dialog "This script can only insert into the body of a message"�
> buttons {"OK"} default button 1 with icon stop
> end try
>
> end tell
>
>
>
>
> ( By the way, all this 'copy' stuff is bad practice too. It doesn't matter
> in this script, but when repeated many times will make your scripts slower
> and eat up memory. 'copy' makes a new copy every time. Expect in the cases
> of lists, records and dates where you do not want to share data (they're
> mutable), always use 'set' instead of copy. 'copy day of current date to da'
> is the only line that needs 'copy'. And why is any of this - aside from 'set
> selection to theTxt' - in an Entourage tell block anyway?
> )
>
> On top of all this, in Panther you don't need any of that guff since you can
> just get the month 'as integer' without offsets. You also keep calling
> 'currnet date' osax over and over again instaed of setting avariable to it
> just once. I'd do the script like this:
>
>
> set currDate to (current date)
> set mo to (month of currDate) as integer
> set mo to text -2 thru -1 of ("0" & mo) -- string
> set da to text -2 thru -1 of ("0" & (day of currDate))
> set yr to (year of currDate as string)
> set theTxt to (mo & "/" & da & "/" & text 3 thru 4 of yr) --not list
> tell application "Microsoft Entourage" to set selection to theTxt
>
>
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