Removing an Item from one List based on Another List

Scripting Forums AppleScript | Mac OS X
#1

Say I have a list:

set myList to {"John Doe/Stuff01", "John Malcom/stuff", "John Doe/Stuff02", "Jane Doe/stuffage", "Jane Doe/wierdness"}

And I have a second list:

set myExclusions to {"John Doe", "Jane Doe"}

I want to be able to take everything in myExclusions as a sort of “contains” and remove them from myList, which would yield:

{"John Malcom/stuff"}

So basically use the contents of one list in a sort of “if a list record in this other list contains this keyword, remove that list entry.”

I can’t even begin to wrap my head around how to manage that.

#2

Hi Kevin,

quick&dirty, it assumes always the slash behind the name in myList

set myList to {"John Doe/Stuff01", "John Malcom/stuff", "John Doe/Stuff02", "Jane Doe/stuffage", "Jane Doe/wierdness"}
set myExclusions to {"John Doe", "Jane Doe"}

set resultList to {}
repeat with j in myList
	if text 1 thru ((offset of "/" in j) - 1) of j is not in myExclusions then set end of resultList to contents of j
end repeat
#3

Hmmm…getting a “1 thru 0” error on the text command. I’m guessing it’s because some of my strings start with the “/” character, because they are directory entries, I hadn’t considered a solution coming back that would be so situation-specific, my bad.

Say I have a directory path like this in the list:

“/Volume/Path/Category/Name/File.jpg”

Then I want to get rid of every entry like this that has “Name” in it. So to elaborate on my first case example:

List #1:
{“/Volume/Path/Category/John Doe/File1.jpg”, “/Volume/Path/Category/Jane Doe/File1.jpg”,“/Volume/Path/Category/John Doe/File2.jpg”,“/Volume/Path/Category/Bob Doe/File1.jpg”}

List #2:
{“Jane Doe”, “Bob Doe”}

If I asked to remove every entry of List #1 that contains something in List #2, I’d get:

{“/Volume/Path/Category/John Doe/File1.jpg”}

I had hoped it would be generic enough a handler without these details, my apologies. I am dealing with path names from a list, such as a shell “find” command or a items dragged on a drag-n-drop script. Idea is I will look for one list, but may have to pare it back before running it through another handler.

Again, sorry for the lack of details impeding progress.

#4

the better the information, the better the quality of the responses :wink:

next try:


set myList to {"/Volume/Path/Category/John Doe/File1.jpg", "/Volume/Path/Category/Jane Doe/File1.jpg", "/Volume/Path/Category/John Doe/File2.jpg", "/Volume/Path/Category/Bob Doe/File1.jpg"}
set myExclusions to {"Jane Doe", "Bob Doe"}
set resultList to {}
set {TID, text item delimiters} to {text item delimiters, "/"}
repeat with j in myList
	if text item -2 of j is not in myExclusions then set end of resultList to contents of j
end repeat
set text item delimiters to TID