a couple hurdles I had with Rev

[Jim Ault]

Perhaps a slight improvement for the count of items/lines appears at the
end.

On 6/15/06 5:18 PM, "Alex Tweedly" <alex at tweedly.net> wrote:

> Mark Smith wrote:
> 
>> 
>> On 16 Jun 2006, at 00:47, Jared Smith wrote:
>> 
>>> Here are a few things that I've been confused about:
>>> 
>>> 1) How do I find the number of times a certain character appears in a
>>> string? The "offset" function only finds the first occurance, it
>>> doesn't count them.
>>> 
>> 
>> This function should work:
>> 
>> function charCount tText,tChar
>>   set the itemDelimiter to tChar
>>   return the number of items in tText - 1
>> end charCount
>> 
> Watch out for the case where the last character in the string is the one
> you are interested in; because there isn't an item after it, this gives
> the wrong result - I'd use
> 
> function charCount tText,tChar
>   set the itemDelimiter to tChar
>   if char -1 of tText = tChar then
>     return the number of items in tText
>   else
>     return the number of items in tText - 1
>   end if
> end charCount
> 
Another approach I use for the "last item empty" scenario you mention, Alex,
is

return the number of items in (tText&null)

--now the count will be correct
---and very unlikely that you would choose an itemDel of null

The same for repeat loops...

repeat with x = 1 to the number of items in (tText&null)
--do the right number of loops
end repeat
repeat with x = 1 to the number of lines in (tText&null)

Jim Ault
Las Vegas