Using variable as a itemdelimiter

warrenk · Post by **warrenk** » Sat Apr 11, 2009 12:52 am

Is the tab key always a numtochar(9)? I am trying to load the itemdelimiter with a variable. When the variable is a 'tab', I am getting a error - 'Source is not a character'.

Would it be safe to use the following for a tab delimiter?

Put numtochar(9) into gDelimiter
set itemdelimiter to gDelimiter

Or is there a better way? The value of the delimiter may change...which is why I don't harcode it:

ie. set itemdelimiter to tab

Thanks for any help!
Warren

FourthWorld · Post by **FourthWorld** » Sat Apr 11, 2009 3:25 am

Tab is one of the supported constants. Used without quotes as a value, it means the same as numtochar(9).

So your example:

set itemdelimiter to tab

..should work just fine.

Bernard · Post by **Bernard** » Sat Apr 11, 2009 11:58 am

Not wishing to put words into Richard's mouth, but I think he is saying that if you do:

Put tab into gDelimiter

then you will achieve what you desire.

Personally, I often use some of the 'non-printing' ASCII characters (around 30 in the code table) as delimiters. As it seems that these characters ('group separator', 'record separator', etc) have generally been forgotten, I can be pretty sure that they will not occur inside any text I am processing.

I only came across one glitch doing this, and it was in transferring a stack between Windows and OS X. Rev does some automatic characters translations between the different OS, and these characters caused problems.

I thought I'd entered it as a bug, but on checking the bug database I can't find the report.