In plain AppleScript if I type:
"dogflower" contains "dog"
and run it, the result is true.
So how come if I type the following:
set string1 to "dogflower"
set string2 to "dog"
string1 contains string2
and run it, the result is false?
It works correctly here as posted. Result = true. Are there any typos or environmental considerations in your original script?
Well that is strange. When I pasted the text from this post into a new script it worked. Then when I went back into the first script and re typed it manually, it also worked. I’m sure there were no typos because I used the original text to paste into this post.
I pasted the text from the original script into a new script and it came back with false. But when I pasted it into TextEdit as text only and then into a new script, it came back with true.
Update on this, I found the problem.
It happened when I captured a string by selecting a phone number in the Contacts app and using this to define a string variable in AppleScript. This happens the same whether I am editing the contact or not. Along with the copied phone number came a null character at the beginning and end of the string.
I isolated the problem down to where a test AppleScript was literally telling me that two variables which visually contained the same string value were not actually the same. I found out the reason by counting the characters in the string. One had more characters. After splitting the strings into lists of characters, “” was a member of the list.
It’s the strangest thing, I didn’t even know that it was possible for a string to contain a null character.