problem with counting words

[larry at significantplanet.org]

Mark,
This is why personal functions are so important.  You like having all the 
words within quotes being seen as a single word for commandline calls.
On the other hand, it is giving me fits having to go from regular quotes to 
curly quotes (for counting) and then back to regular quotes for display 
(since LC displays a curly quote as some oddball char).  But if I could 
write my own function for that stuff, wow.

I do not have ANY experience with frontscripts, backscripts, plug-ins, 
whatever.  Maybe some day.  In the meantime, if anyone wants to write/point 
to a detailed explanation of how to do it, that will be great.
I would say that an ability for me to write functions and have them 
available for scripting would be #1 on my wish list.
Larry

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Mark Wieder" <mwieder at ahsoftware.net>
To: "How to use LiveCode" <use-livecode at lists.runrev.com>
Sent: Sunday, October 12, 2014 6:32 PM
Subject: Re: problem with counting words


> larry-
>
> Sunday, October 12, 2014, 5:16:45 PM, you wrote:
>
>> Hello Mark,
>> It truly pleases me that you explained a reason for text within quotes 
>> being
>> a single word.
>
> Glad I could help.
>
>> I don't have enough experience (actually none) in defining arguments for
>> commandline syntax and would never have thought of that.
>> So now I must say, "OK, there is a reason."
>
> It's pretty simple, really. If I have a program that counts lines in a
> file (let's call it linecount) and I want to call it with a file to
> work on, then from a command prompt I would say something like
>
> linecount fileToWorkOn.txt
>
> However, if someone made a file with a name that had embedded spaces,
>
> linecount some file with spaces.txt
>
> wouldn't work because the first thing that would happen is the
> linecount program would try to work on file "some". What I'd need to
> do in that case is say
>
> linecount "some file with spaces.txt"
>
> And then the operating system would treat everything within the quotes
> as a single parameter. So I can extrapolate from that to xtalk
> languages treating everything within quotes as a single entity.
>
>> If anyone knows how to do that for the IDE so that the function I write 
>> is
>> now available to me for ANY script of ANY stack, I would love to hear 
>> about
>> it.
>
> Well, my first advice would be to wait for the next major version of
> LiveCode, because the new initiative (I'm too tired and lazy at the
> moment to look up the name) is designed to give you exactly that
> capability.
>
> But if you want to play around with it now, you'll want to read up on
> frontscripts and backscripts. If you, for example, put a function into
> a script and then insert the script into the backscripts, the function
> will be available to any stack. This is a large part of how the IDE
> itself works.
>
> -- 
> -Mark Wieder
> ahsoftware at gmail.com
>
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