Babs weekly Script Question- regarding lists {} {""}

Scripting Forums AppleScript | Mac OS X
#1

Hello,

In this script, I am taking the contents of the front finder window and placing the names of the files in a text document. I have a few questions that I do not understand and hopefully someone can explain them to me :wink:

tell application "Finder"
	set these_items to sort (get every document file of the front Finder window) by physical size
	set these_names to {}
	repeat with i from 1 to the count of these_items
		set the end of these_names to the name of (item i of these_items)
	end repeat
end tell
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to return
set the item_list to these_names as string
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to {""}
tell application "TextEdit"
	activate
	make new document
	set text of document 1 to the item_list
end tell

Question 1- in these lines:
set the item_list to these_names as string
set AppleScript’s text item delimiters to {“”}

Can someone please tell me, why the “” are necessary? It seems if I remove them, it still works? I assume it has to do with line above it, as string? but I am just not sure about these 2 lines.

Question 2- I Sorted the list by physical size as indicated, and then I tried name, which worked fine, but when I try modification date or creation date, the order changes, but it is not correct. This is not the first time I have tried to do something with date order that made a different order than it should of. Is there a logical reason for this?

Question 3-right now I am just getting the files in the front finder window, if there were a mix of files and folder’s, how might I ask for that? I tried “get every document file of the front Finder window and every folder of the front Finder window”, but of course that didn’t work :wink:

If someone could explain any of these, It would be helpful :wink:
thanks
babs

#2

Hi,

  1. I already answered the question here
    The default value of text item delimiters is an empty string “” as list → {“”}, which just concatenates the list elements in case they are strings.

  2. no idea

  3. item is the parent class of file and folder. You could write


.
every item of something whose class is document file or class is folder
.
#3

Hi Stefan!!

Thank you for putting up with the senile folks…I swear I am losing my mind!!!

just thought I would ask…it’s very weird…

perfect!

thanks!!!
babs

#4
  1. The Finder’s ‘sort’ command has always (when it’s worked at all) sorted dates from youngest to oldest. It’s the default order when arranging by date in a Finder window. You can easily reverse the order if you want:
tell application "Finder"
	set these_items to reverse of (sort every document file of the front Finder window by modification date)
end tell

You don’t need ‘get’ after ‘sort’. It only slows things down.

#5

Hi Nigel,

I tried that, but I get the following error message:

Finder got an error: every document file of Finder window 1 doesn’t understand the sort message.

Actually the problem isn’t the order in reverse or not, but that, the dates would in fact be out of order?

any thoughts?
thanks
babs

#6

No. You’ve got me. I’ve tried everything I can think of and haven’t been able to reproduce either problem. :expressionless: