Boy, some folks sure are hard to please. 
Works perfectly here, too, Eelco. As Adam suggests, perhaps there’s a local issue involved ” although the “does not always work” suggests an instability somewhere.
Another point to watch out for is exactly where one applies the as Unicode text coercion.
If we use display dialog (run script ("«data utxt" & i & "»") as Unicode text)
or display dialog (run script (("«data utxt" & i & "»") as Unicode text))
… then the Unicode text coercion is simply applied to the string that results from the concatenation. So the script to be run is merely “«data utxt2318»” ” albeit in its Unicode text form, rather than plain text.
However, a more effective script would include the coercion itself: “«data utxt2318» as Unicode text”. That way, the Unicode text coercion is applied directly to the data itself, rather than merely to some text.
So, if an explicit Unicode text coercion is to be included, the code should really look something more like:
display dialog (run script ("«data utxt" & i & "» as Unicode text"))That said, I doubt any of this will improve matters for you. My guess is that something at a deeper level could be affecting your results.
All the same, no harm in trying…
