Bruce Phillips, one of the leading posters at MacScripter, posted a very useful method on his blog which you can use to find and replace text in a variable. Below is the code he created and an example so you can test it in the Script Editor.
on replaceText(find, replace, subject)
set prevTIDs to text item delimiters of AppleScript
set text item delimiters of AppleScript to find
set subject to text items of subject
set text item delimiters of AppleScript to replace
set subject to "" & subject
set text item delimiters of AppleScript to prevTIDs
return subject
end replaceText
get replaceText("Windows", "the Mac OS", "I love Windows and I will always love Windows and I have always loved Windows.")
Mr. Phillips has over 2500 postings at MacScripter and one can learn a lot from browsing through them to see the various solutions he has proposed to people’s problems.
4 Comments
Hi,
thank you for this excellent script.
I am actually trying to do the same but base on arrays.
I’d like to do multiple substitution in one go.
I could surely use a loop, but it’s rather slow (we’re talking about several hundreds of items)
Thanks again!
Finally a simple solution to my text scripting “problem”.
Thank you!
…and I promise: I will always love the Mac!
Might I suggest a small edit? How about telling the function to throw an error if it did not find any instances of the string to be replaced? I wrote “set originalString to subject” at the top of the function. At the bottom, I wrote:
“if subject is originalString then
error find & ” is not in the subject string.”
end if