Tip on Coding URLs

[Dan Shafer]

I can't find the old Tip of the Week (Year?) on the RunRev site. Maybe 
they've given it a decent burial.

But this one seemed worth sharing.

Tonight in a late-night coding session I ran into a problem using a URL 
argument. Chipp Walters gave me a tip that saved my bacon and will do 
so many times over.

If you've ever tried to pass a URL in a variable, at least in OS X, 
you've found that it doesn't work. Thus:

put "file:/Users/smith/Documents/Stuff/notes.html" into tURL
put field "Test" into URL tURL

will (at least for me) always break. No error, just no output. So over 
the year or so I've been working with URLs, I've come to modify that 
two-line script like so:

put "/Users/smith/Documents/Stuff/notes.html" into tURL
put field "Test" into URL "file:" & tURL

For some reason that has generally worked.

Last night I had a more complex situation and no matter what syntax I 
tried, I could not get Rev to write the HTML file for me. I pinged 
Chipp and he suggested I *always* put URL arguments in parentheses. He 
also said that he, too, has had no luck passing a complete URL as a 
variable, and generally breaks it into at least two pieces. But putting 
them into parentheses makes things work, at least so far, much more 
reliably. I would never have thought to do this since URL isn't a 
function, but this was a valuable lesson. I hope others can benefit 
from Chipp's hard-won wisdom.

put field "Teset" into URL ("file:" & tURL)

and other combinations of more complex URL assembly all seem to work 
fine.


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Dan Shafer, Revolutionary
Author of  "Revolution: Software at the Speed of Thought"
http://www.revolutionpros.com for more info
Available at Runtime Revolution Store (http://www.runrev.com/RevPress)