macOS Applescript Is there a way to search for a time or date withi text

[wild4life2013]

I have a script that has a repeat loop that set a variable to some text I would like to be able to search that text and different information out. like any date it contains or times.

thanks in advance for any help

 

[superscape]

Hi,

You might want to look at the regular expressions functionality within Satimage.osax

http://www.satimage.fr/software/en/downloads/downloads_companion_osaxen.html

Hope that's some help

 

[wild4life2013]

thanks superscape ill check it out

 

[wild4life2013]

I extracted the time using the code below

set theText to "test of extracting the time 19:30 from all of the other text"
set theOffset to offset of ":" in theText
set num to theOffset - 2
set thetime to text (theOffset + 2) thru num of theText

this works well.
couldn't work it out with the Satimage OSAX but have used it in other scripts.

 

[superscape]

Regexp

Hi,

Yep, that would work if you're confident that you'll never get text like:

"Here foo:bar blah blah blah"

In which case, your script would get a false match of "oo:ba" which clearly isn't a time. If you were to use Satimage OSAX then you could use a regular expression such as:

set theText to "test of extracting the time 19:30 from all of 19 the other text"

set theFoundTimes to find text "[0-9]{2}:[0-9]{2}" in theText with all occurrences and regexp

Which would match any two digits, a colon then another two digits. You'd probably want to tweak the regular expression to avoid things like 1234:34567 (as an example) if there's a chance they might appear in your text. Writing clever regular expressions is not my strong point!

Hope that's some help,

Rob

 

[wild4life2013]

Thanks superscape (Rob) that great thanks