Find location of substrings the hard way

Question

In order to find the location of a substring in a string I tend to use this method:
set ptrFind to (offset of "get in "target" as string)
this results in ptrFind = 3
However, I'm at a loss when it gets more complex like when I want to find the location of the second "get" in the string "to get to the target".
Any suggestions?

Answer 1

Once you have found the first offset, you can use that as the beginning of the text to get your other offset. From there, to get the offset into the original string, you just have to add the original item back in (plus a correction factor for changing the starting point):
set Target to "let us proceed to get another get"
set SubString to "get"
set FirstOffset to offset of SubString in Target -- the first item
log result
get offset of SubString in (text (FirstOffset + (count SubString)) thru -1 of Target)
set SecondOffset to result + FirstOffset + (count SubString) - 1 -- the second item
log result
I also have a handler that gets all of the offsets and returns them in a list:
<pre style="
font-family: Monaco, 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;
font-size: 10px;
font-weight: normal;
margin: 0px;
padding: 5px;
border: 1px solid #000000;
width: 720px; height: 340px;
color: #000000;
background-color: #FFEE80;
overflow: auto;"
title="this text can be pasted into the Script Editor">
on run -- example
set TheText to "this is some testing text, some testing text this is"
set TheItem to "is"
set TheOffsets to (GetTheOffsets of TheItem from TheText)
-- show the result
set the beginning of TheOffsets to "The offsets of \"" & TheItem & "\":"
set the beginning of TheOffsets to "The text: \"" & TheText & "\""
choose from list TheOffsets with prompt "Search results:" with empty selection allowed
end run
to GetTheOffsets of SomeItem from SomeText
return a list of all offsets of SomeItem in SomeText
parameters - SomeItem [text]: the text to look for
SomeText [text]: the text to look in
  returns [list]: a list of offset(s) - {} if none found
set {OffsetList, OffsetCount} to {{}, 1}
repeat
set TheOffset to (offset of SomeItem in (text OffsetCount thru -1 of SomeText))
if TheOffset is less than 1 then
exit repeat
else
set OffsetCount to OffsetCount + TheOffset
set end of OffsetList to OffsetCount - 1
end if
end repeat
return OffsetList
end GetTheOffsets
</pre>