Re: [MacPerl] StyledText data into a record of text and styl

[Alan Fry]

At 3:41 pm -0500 18/03/01, Ronald J Kimball wrote:
>  > With the greatest respect I think you have both misunderstood what I
>>  was driving at.
>
>I think we're all misunderstanding each other.  :/

It's my fault -- my capacity for being unclear is as great as my
capacity for getting hold of the wrong end of any two ended stick...

>The four characters I was referring to are not buried in a mush.  They're
>the *first* four characters, which are at the beginning of the string.  :)

I see what you mean. For instance a return from MSWD reads at the beginning:

DSIG<¸ðCLAP&MSWDMURFOBJDRTF stylTEXTPICTNATVOLNKTEXTHello
here is something
styl
       RTF  etc, etc...


So you're suggesting (if I have it correctly) the 'long' following
'DSIG' should be the number of bytes up to the beginning of 'TEXT'
and so on. Yes -- of course. (I haven't got this to work yet, but
that's irrelevant to the argument.)

As you said in an earlier post this _presumes_ that the number
following each 'four character group' will be a 'long'. In the case
of the MSWD extract above 'DSIG' is an MS key, rather than a MacOS
key, so one would be reliant on BG doing the expected thing. As you
said before, and I missed the point, that's the tricky bit.

My apologies for not having read your original post carefully enough
and thanks for the interesting idea. As you say, it is a robust way
of doing it by purely Perl methods.

Alan Fry