AppleScript in a Nutshell

Name

string

Allowed coercions

list with one item; numbers as long as the string is a valid integer

real

international text

Unicode text

Syntax

set myString to "Good old string" as string

Description

AppleScript strings are like strings in other languages (arrays of characters), except that they have to be surrounded by double quotation marks; you do not have the option of using single quotation marks. You can get the number of characters in a string, including spaces, by using a string’s length property:

length of myString

AppleScript strings have the following built-in elements:

characters

paragraphs

text

words

Examples

The statement:

words of myString

or:

every word of myString

will return a list of strings containing each of the words in the original string ({"Good”,"old”,"string"}). This is handy if your script wants to examine or otherwise process each of the words in a string. The same goes for the other elements; characters of myString returns a list of strings, with each item in the list being a single-character string ({"G”, “o”, “o”, “d”, " “, “o”, “l”, “d”, " “, “s”, “t”, “r”, “i”, “n”, “g"}). The following example iterates through this list and returns the number of non-space characters in the string. Items in lists are one-based, meaning that the first character in a string is character 1. These statements would make a nice subroutine for a string-handling library:

set myString to "Good old string" set noSpaceCharCount to 0 repeat with c from 1 to (length of myString) (*space ...