The latest edition (4.0) of MacScripter’s Magazine, the e-zine devoted to AppleScript, is out, and the first two chapters are dedicated to two techniques:
“For some type of work (e-mail; web sites) it would be convenient to process (plain) text automatically,” said Roy Barber of MacScripter. “The last two chapters show how to do it, and provide the reader with more power than he or she could have dreamed of. For example, use wildcards to search a text. This is done with Leonard Rosenthol’s free Regex commands osax.”
The fourth issue also comes with a big bonus: the Muncher, an interface for AppleScript. Just drag a text onto this “helplet,” and the text is processed automatically. The fully functional demo of the Muncher in the e-zine will: remove HTML tags from an HTML document and count the number of hyperlinks; and extract e-mail and Web addresses from a text.
“For BBEdit users familiar with grep (if they are not, they should!), there is a BBEdit version of the Muncher, which is even more powerful,” Barber said. “Plus, there is no 32 K text limitation. It could well change the way people work with BBEdit.”
MacScripter goals also include working towards scripts people will perceive as useful and to alleviate the syntax problem, he adds. You can get more info at the e-zine’s Web site, but there’s no formal way to subscribe. Its founders just hope that Mac sites “pay attention to us and interested people pay attention to Mac sites.”