So, that's it. How can I write to a text file using AppleScript?
I've tried googling around, but answers seem to be years old and I'm not really sure what should be the preferred idiom this days.
on write_to_file(this_data, target_file, append_data) -- (string, file path as string, boolean)
try
set the target_file to the target_file as text
set the open_target_file to ¬
open for access file target_file with write permission
if append_data is false then ¬
set eof of the open_target_file to 0
write this_data to the open_target_file starting at eof
close access the open_target_file
return true
on error
try
close access file target_file
end try
return false
end try
end write_to_file
Interfacing with it can be cleaned up with the following...
my WriteLog("Once upon a time in Silicon Valley...")
on WriteLog(the_text)
set this_story to the_text
set this_file to (((path to desktop folder) as text) & "MY STORY")
my write_to_file(this_story, this_file, true)
end WriteLog
A short version in pure AppleScript:
set myFile to open for access (choose file name) with write permission
write "hello world" to myFile
close access myFile
It seems there is no native one command solution. Instead you have to open and later close the file.
#JuanANavarro.
When using the shell you should use quoted form of for the TEXT and the file path.
This will help stop errors with spaces in file names and characters like apostrophes in the text for example.
set someText to "I've also learned that a quick hack, if one only wants to spit a bit of text to a file, is to use the shell."
set textFile to "/Users/USERNAME/Desktop/foo.txt"
do shell script "echo " & quoted form of someText & " > " & quoted form of textFile
The above script works fine.
If I did not have & quoted form of someText
but instead I had & someText I would get the following error.
error "sh: -c: line 0: unexpected EOF while looking for matching `''
sh: -c: line 1: syntax error: unexpected end of file" number 2
The apostrophes in "I've" is seen as part of the command.
If I had
set textFile to "/Users/USERNAME/Desktop/some foo.txt" as my file path ( note the space.) And did not have & quoted form of textFile but instead I had & textFile
Then when the file was written out it would write to a file named "some" and not "some foo.txt"
I've also learned that a quick hack, if one only wants to spit a bit of text to a file, is to use the shell.
do shell script "echo TEXT > some_file.txt"
For me running do shell script was too slow on a PowerBook G4 when executed in a loop 300000 times ;), but of course that's quicker to write which sometimes makes sense. You would also want to escape shell characters like this:
do shell script "echo " & quoted form of foobar & " >> some_file.txt"
and for aesthetic reasons I would use
tell me to do shell script "#..."
but I haven't verified yet (what I believe) that if "do shell script" is in a block of "tell Finder" for example it is Finder process that creates a subshell. With "tell me to do shell script" at least Script Editor log looks better for me. ;)
Related
I need to replace char "\" and it is not working. my script as follow.
I'm using same script for many other replacements and somehow this is not working.
export VCA='http:\\/\\/localhost\\/dev1'
export VCB='https:\\/\\/www.mydomain.com'
sed "s~${VCA}~${VCB}~g" tmp2.sql > tmp3.sql
I don't see error anymore but it does not replace the string.
Try:
VCA='http://localhost/dev1'
VCB='https://www.example.com'
sed "s~${VCA}~${VCB}~g" tmp2.sql > tmp3.sql
Note: stackoverflow's answer text editor seems to dislike having www.mydomain.com in the code, so $VCB uses a dummy value which can be changed back as needed.
I am trying to create a shell script for logs and trying to append data into a text file. I have write this sample "test.sh" code for testing:
#!/bin/sh -e
touch /home/sample.txt
SPTH = '/home/sample'.txt
echo "MY LOG FILE" >> "$SPTH"
echo "DUMP started at $(date +'%d-%m-%Y %H:%M:%S')" >> /home/sample.txt
echo "DUMP finished at $(date +'%d-%m-%Y %H:%M:%S')" >> /home/sample.txt
but in above code all lines are working correct except one line of code i.e.
echo "MY LOG FILE" >> "$SPTH"
It is giving error:
test.sh: line 6: : No such file or directory
I want to replace this full path of file "/home/sample.txt" to variable "$SPATH".
I am executing my shell script using
sh test.sh
What I am doing wrong.
Variable assignments in bash shell does not allow you to have spaces within. It will be actually interpreted as command with = and the subsequent keywords as arguments to the first word, which is wrong.
Change your code to
SPTH="/home/sample.txt"
That is the reason why SPTH was not assigned to the actual path you intended it to have. And you have no reason to have single-quote here and excluding the extension part. Using it fully within double-quotes is absolutely fine.
The syntax for the command line is that the first token is a command, tokens are separated by whitespace. So:
SPTH = '/home/sample'.txt
Has the command as SPTH, the second token is =, and so on. You might think this is daft, but most shells behave like this for historical reasons.
So you need to remove the whitespace:
SPTH='/home/sample'.txt
Getting a weird error in Unix Bash.
Might anybody have an idea what is going on?
I run a shell like this:
nohup sas -sysin dir/program1.sas
and it comes up with an error like this:
ERROR: Invalid file, dir/program1.sas.sas.
Why does it add an extra suffix .sas.?
It does not happen when I just paste the code into a Putty window though.
That is the normal error message when SAS cannot find the file specified. Examples:
> sas unknown
ERROR: Invalid file, unknown.sas.
> sas unknown.sas
ERROR: Invalid file, unknown.sas.
The strange part is that SAS is treating the .sas suffix as if it was part of the filename, instead of recognizing it. Are you sure that you do not have some hidden characters in there that do not show up when echoed to the screen? Perhaps a backspace or cursor movement character?
Resolved.
Had to do with the text file's encoding.
Here's how it worked:
1). Create a new variable in Unix vi editor
2). Paste these lines into it:
"
#!/usr/bin/env bash
nohup sas -sysin dir/program1.sas &
nohup sas -sysin dir/program2.sas &
nohup sas -sysin dir/program3.sas ;
"
Now I can chain the programs to run in parallel and in sequence.
Thank you.
I want to get a plain text file from the French Wikipedia dump XML file.
To that end, I am applying a Perl script
I can give the full file if necessary, I only added the line
tr/a-zàâééèëêîôûùç-/ /cs;
to the script here: http://mattmahoney.net/dc/textdata.html
However, when I run on linux terminal:
perl filterwikifr.pl frwiki.xml > frwikiplaintext.txt
the output text file does not print accentuated letters correctly. For example, I get catégorie instead of catégorie...
I also tried:
perl -CS filterwikifr.pl frwiki.xml > frwikiplaintext.txt
without better success (and other variants instead of -CS...)
the problem is with the text editor gedit.
If, instead of opening the file directly, I open gedit, and then go to "open" and down, in "Character encoding", I choose UTF-8 instead of "Automatically Detected", then the accents are printed correctly.
I wrote a little Bash script and I'm having a problem while reading from the command line. I think its because I wrote the script on Windows. Here is the code:
read NEW_MODX_PROJECT
and the output of the debug mode
+ read $'NEW_MODX_PROJECT\r'
Finally here the error I get
': Ist kein gültiger Bezeichner.DX_PROJECT
I think in English it should mean "': is not a valid identifier.DX_PROJECT"
While writing it on Windows, it worked fine. I used console2 to test it which is using the sh.exe.
Your assertion is correct -- Windows uses CRLF line separators but Linux just uses a LF.
The reason for your strange error message is that while printing the name of your variable, it includes the carriage return as part of its name -- the terminal then jumps back to the first column to print the rest of the error message (which overwrites the beginning of the message with the end of it).
There are a set of utilities known as dos2unix and unix2dos which you can use to easily convert between formats, e.g.:
dos2unix myscript.sh
If you don't happen to have them, you can achieve the same using tr:
tr -d '\r' < myscript.sh > myscript-new.sh
Either will strip all the carriage returns and should un-confuse things.