Wildcards within AppleScript

Question

I'm generating HTML and CSS automatically from Scrivener, a Mac-only author's writing program (a very good one).
I've got a lot of documents to process and I want to tweak the CSS beyond what Scrivener automatically generates, and at the same time make all documents adhere to a single standard. In order to make this happen I've created an AppleScript to work to run through the HTML text to do a stream of search and replace functions. So far, this works very well.
However, there are some segments where the string between one predictable delimiter and another is unpredictable. What's called for is a wildcard to select all the text between the delimiters and replace it with something else.
Someone elsewhere has said there's no syntax for wildcards within AppleScript. Not sure of the truth of that. What's the procedure to achieve my objective?
Much appreciated.

Answer 1

Ah - you are wanting to extract HTML elements. This is a little bit different than wildcards and substrings, and dropping some script snippets into an application tell statement. There are some existing scripts out there for extracting HTML, as well as those that read text files. BBEdit is also scriptable, so I think this wound up being a little more difficult than it needed to be. Anyway, now that I know more about what you are wanting to do, give the following script a try - I didn't know anyone else used a version of BBEdit as old as mine (TextWrangler works too).
The following script takes the text of the front BBEdit window, extracts the HTML elements specified, and creates a new window with the results:
<pre style="
font-family: Monaco, 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;
font-size: 10px;
margin: 0px;
padding: 5px;
border: 1px solid #000000;
width: 720px; height: 335px;
color: #000000;
background-color: #FFDDFF;
overflow: auto;"
title="this text can be pasted into the Script Editor">
on run
tell application "BBEdit 6.5.3"
get the text of the front window
my GetHTMLElements(the result, "<script", "</script>", false)
set text of (make new window) to the result as text
end tell
end run
to GetHTMLElements(SomeText, OpenTag, CloseTag, ContentsOnly)
return a list of the specified HTML elements in SomeText
parameters - SomeText [text]: the text to look at
OpenTag [text]: the opening tag (can be a partial)
CloseTag [text]: the complete closing tag
                            ContentsOnly [boolean]: return just the contents, or the entire element
returns [list]: a list of the HTML elements found - {""} if none
set TextBuffer to SomeText as text
set CurrentOffset to 1 -- the current offset in the text buffer
set ElementList to {} -- the list of elements found
try
repeat
set Here to offset of OpenTag in (text CurrentOffset thru -1 of TextBuffer) -- start of opening tag
if Here is 0 then exit repeat -- not found
set CurrentOffset to CurrentOffset + Here
set CurrentTag to CurrentOffset - 1 -- mark the start of the element
if OpenTag does not end with ">" then -- find the close of the tag
set Here to offset of ">" in (text CurrentOffset thru -1 of TextBuffer) -- end of opening tag
if Here is 0 then exit repeat -- not found
set CurrentOffset to CurrentOffset + Here
end if
set Here to CurrentOffset
set There to offset of CloseTag in (text CurrentOffset thru -1 of TextBuffer) -- end tag
if There is 0 then exit repeat -- not found
set CurrentOffset to CurrentOffset + There - 2
set There to CurrentOffset
if ContentsOnly then
set the end of ElementList to text Here thru There of TextBuffer & return
else
set the end of ElementList to text CurrentTag thru (There + (length of CloseTag)) of TextBuffer & return
end if
end repeat
on error ErrorMessage number ErrorNumber
if (ErrorNumber is -128) or (ErrorNumber is -1711) then -- nothing (user cancelled)
else
activate me
display alert "Error " & (ErrorNumber as string) message ErrorMessage as warning buttons {"OK"} default button "OK"
end if
end try
if ElementList is {} then set ElementList to {""}
return ElementList
end GetHTMLElements
</pre>