Parsing Notes Field in Address book with Applescript

Question

I've been working with Applescript to create a custom workflow for a mailer app that I'm creating. I want to store information about a particular contact in one of the following two formats:
Either:
Test 1
Test 2
or
[aDate] | Text text text text
The | is a delimiter. I want to get the aDate and use that as part of a text and then parse this string into the following:
{"aDate","Text text text text"}
Unfortunately all of my attempts seem to treat the notes field as one long string. Has anyone been able to parse the notes field of data?

Answer 1

Once you get the note paragraph into a string (noteString), useset oldDelims to Applescript's text item delimiters
set Applescript's text item delimiters to "|"
set theDate to first text item of noteString
set theText to second text item of noteString
set Applescript's text item delimiters to oldDelims
While Applescript will reset the delimiters, you should always do it yourself as I did.