Ugh. Bogged down...

[Brian Yennie]

> I was trying to understand what you're saying, below, about replacing 
> the
> (cr & cr) with cr, and don't see where you're referring to this in the
> original suggestion I'm working with.  It is likely I missed something
> (important).

In the original question, IIRC you wanted to strip extra returns and 
leading spaces from lines of text, particularly HTML. The suggestion to 
use:

replace (cr&cr) with cr in tData

Is basically saying "whenever you find two consecutive returns, replace 
them with one". A few passes through and you should find that all of 
the extra returns are gone.

So something like this might be worth a try:

## put the field data into a variable for fast access
put fld "Imported_Raw" into tData

## keep replacing double return until there are none left
repeat while (tData contains (cr&cr))
    replace (cr&cr) with cr in tData
end repeat

## keep replacing leading spaces until there are none left
repeat while (tData contains (cr&space))
    replace (cr&space) with cr in tData
end repeat

There are probably a lot of interesting ways to go about the task- you 
could also use the replaceText() function with a regular expression to 
fix the whole thing in one pass. But RegEx isn't always fun...

> It would be awesome to get times like 5 seconds, but I must admit that 
> I'll
> be happy to just get it in the 'couple-of-minutes' range!
>
> One of the lines provided to me says:
>
>  repeat for each line tLine in tData
>
> As I'm working with further 'massaging' of the grabbed text, I'm 
> playing
> with some of this code and this one left me scratching my head (and 
> there
> ain't a lot of hair up there!) -- what is the function of the 
> (variable?)
> tLine in this text?  I didn't see it previously declared in the script 
> and
> wondered why this wouldn't simply be:
>
> repeat for each line in tData
>
> Instead.  Again, I'm sure I missed something important, but I really AM
> paying attention.

Think of the above syntax as a replacement for the slower (but still 
available) syntax:

repeat with i=1 to (number of lines in tData)
    put line i of tData into tLine
    ...
end repeat

Instead of using a counter variable, and also gaining lots of speed, 
you can just write:

repeat for each line tLine in tData
   ...
end repeat

The results will be exactly the same- except that the second will run 
much faster and syntax-wise, serves as a sort of shorthand for the 
former.


> I also wanted to comment that one of the reasons I decided to go with
> Revolution instead of any of the other suggestions is the tone and
> helpfulness of the members of this list.  I'm glad to be a member of a 
> list
> where everyone seems to want to share ideas, rather than berate the 
> newbies
> or 'one-up' the others on the list.  Hopefully the developers remember 
> those
> who bought in at the ground floor when they're rich and famous...  (For
> those of you who've been around the Mac arena since 1983 (yes, I said 
> "3"),
> think HyperCard, and FirstClass, etc.)

Amen! I think you'll find there's a real mix here: quite a few old 
Hypercard hats mixed in with a little of everything else. Personally, I 
can only trace my Hypercard roots back to about 1992, but in my 
defense, I was 3 years old for the majority of 1983...

- Brian