macOS Zatanna Magic Spell Generator

[VideoBeagle]

​

So, Zatanna, Mistress of Magic, came to me and said "Since you've been playing with reversing file names with Applescript, can you write one to help me cast my spells?"*

Well, not being one to say "no" to a witch, I figured I'd give it a try.

As we all know, Zatanna says her spells by speaking backwards...but only the words..so backwards words, forward sentences.

set alphabet to characters of "abcdefghijklmnopqestuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ0123456789'-"
set theword to ""
set thespell to ""

(* Ask for spell, forward words *)
display dialog "Enter your spell:" default answer ""
set sentence to text returned of result
#set sentence to "This is a magic spell"

set slist to characters of sentence
#log slist

(*find words, revese them, add them to spell. Keep punctuation as is*)
repeat with theletter in slist
	if theletter is in alphabet then
		set theword to theword & theletter
	else
		set thespell to thespell & " " & (the reverse of characters in theword as string) & theletter
		set theword to ""
	end if
end repeat

(*add final word to spell if needed*)
if theword is not "" then
	set thespell to thespell & " " & (the reverse of characters in theword as string)
end if

(* Remove extra spaces *)
#set thespell to ((characters 2 thru -1 of thespell) as string)

set AppleScript's text item delimiters to space
set textItems to every text item of thespell
repeat with x from 1 to count my textItems
	if item x of my textItems = "" then set item x of my textItems to missing value
end repeat
set thespell to text of my textItems as string
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to ""
#return thespell

set the clipboard to thespell
display dialog thespell

(I found the script at the end to get rid of the extra spaces at macscripter.net)

Is there a better way to go about this? Someway to clean up the code?
(I know it doesn't deal with capitalization...googling looks like that's a headache for applescript).
I don't want to give someone who can turn me into a newt a bad program.


(* It was actually my friend, Andy, but isn't this story more fun? )

 

[Red Menace]

AppleScript knows about words, so if you don't care about punctuation, you can do something like:

set sentence to text returned of (display dialog "Enter your spell:" default answer "This is a magic spell")

set reversed to ""
repeat with aWord in (words of sentence)
	set reversed to reversed & ((reverse of characters of aWord) as text) & space
end repeat

display dialog reversed buttons {"OK"} default button 1

 

[VideoBeagle]

AppleScript knows about words, so if you don't care about punctuation, you can do something like:

Yeah, v.1 didn't do punctuation:

display dialog "Enter your spell:" default answer ""
set answer to text returned of result
set zanswer to ""
set {myTID, AppleScript's text item delimiters} to {AppleScript's text item delimiters, {" "}}
set myList to text items of answer
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to myTID
repeat with fword in myList
	#set testf to fword
	#set fword to each
	set zword to reverse of characters in fword as string
	set zanswer to zanswer & " " & zword
end repeat
set zansewer to ((characters 2 thru -1 of zanswer) as string)
set the clipboard to zanswer
display dialog zanswer

 

[JustMartin]

From a purely stylistic view, I would consider adding a space to the end of your string before you start. This would save you having the check for the final word (and the repeated chunk of code)

 

[VideoBeagle]

From a purely stylistic view, I would consider adding a space to the end of your string before you start. This would save you having the check for the final word (and the repeated chunk of code)

Ah.. Good idea.
I had originally had that bit in as I found if there wasn't punctuation (or a space) at the end, the last word was never added..took me a while to figure out why I was losing a word...I made it a If-then for good practice....your solution is far more elegant.

A friend (the same one who made the challenge) gave me a python script that pops up a picture of Zatanna saying the spell. I added the code so it works...

do shell script "python /Users/Scav/aa2/zee.py" & " " & thespell