I’m getting a list of file names from a folder and I have a list of names to exclude from the file names list. What’s the best way to do that? Here’s what I have so far…
set thePath to path to desktop folder
tell application "System Events" to set allList to name of every item of thePath whose (name is not ".DS_Store" and name is not ".localized")
The above works but the problem is I need the list of names to exclude to be in a list, because the list items will change. So I tried this but it doesn’t work.
set excludedList to {".DS_Store", ".localized"}
set thePath to path to desktop folder
tell application "System Events" to set allList to name of every item of thePath whose name is not in excludedList
I can loop through the file names list, and check each one against the exclude list, and build a new list of those names… but that’s not very fast. Is there a better way?
set thePath to path to desktop folder
tell application "Finder" to set allList to name of every item of thePath
I’m not sure what that is StefanK, it doesn’t exclude anything. What do you mean?
Oh I get it, it will exclude those items, but I need to see other invisible items that may be in the folder, so using the Finder doesn’t work because it doesn’t show any invisible items.
I was just kidding a bit ;),
the Finder excludes all invisible files, System Events does not
Yes, I figured that but at first you had me confused! 
Why doesn’t the “whose name is not in…” work. If I search the forums that is the answer that is given… so when did it stop working and why did is stop working? I certainly don’t want to loop through the file names list if I don’t have to.
This seems to work:
set excludedList to {"Dev"}
set thePath to path to home folder
tell application "Finder" to set allList to name of every item of thePath whose name is not in excludedList
That does work! Unfortunately I can’t use the Finder as I explained. But why does that work and not the same thing with system events? Very strange…