Indesign Find paragraph based on character position

Scripting Forums AppleScript | Mac OS X
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#1

I am trying to convert a QuarkXPress script into an Indesign CS2 script, but I’m not having much luck.

I have a QuarkXPress 6.5 script that does the following:
– finds a specific character in a text box
– gets the first character of the paragraph containing this character

This is the sample text that I’ve been using for this script.

This is a sample list
1 Marketing
2 Shipping
3 +placeholder
4 Legal

Here’s the QuarkXPress script…

tell application "QuarkXPress"
	tell front document
		tell text box 1
			set astPosition to index of (every character whose it is "+")
			set paraPosition to (index of paragraph 1 whose it contains character astPosition)
			set theChar to character 1 of paragraph paraPosition
		end tell
	end tell
end tell

And the Indesign version that isn’t working…

tell application "Adobe InDesign CS2"
	tell front document
		tell text frame 1
			set astPosition to index of (every character whose it is "+")
			set paraPosition to (index of paragraph 1 whose it contains character astPosition)
			set theChar to character 1 of paragraph paraPosition
		end tell
	end tell
end tell

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,

Jeff

#2

Well, your code so far isn’t showing much of what you want to achieve with this, but the following should work:

tell application "Adobe InDesign CS2"
	tell front document
		set TheParagraphs to object reference of every paragraph of text frame 1 whose contents contains "+"
		set theChar to first character of item 1 of TheParagraphs
	end tell
end tell

This will give you a list of object references for the paragraphs that contain the “+” symbol as well as the first character’s contents of the first item in that list. To go any further I would need to know more about what you are trying to achieve.

#3

Thanks… that makes sense. I haven’t used object reference in my scripting much. Looks like I should. That does the trick.

As far as what I want to achieve with this… I’m compiling a list of which number the placeholder text appears next to. Similar text to my sample text repeats multiple times throughout a longer document. I have the script repeating through each text box and looking for specific information. The plus sign marks the correct answer.

Thanks again!

Jeff