Help! Getting the index of a Character from the Characters collection

[Vamitul]

so, in a script i need to remove the text from the begining of the paragraph until the first tab (or dot or colon or "something") charater as simple and as fast as posible.

i was hoping for something like

myText=myParagraph.characters.itemByRange(0,"\t");
myText.remove();

Ofcourse i can use grep, but it has it's problems, and i was hoping i don't have to (especialy since the script will have to do this for 400+ times.

Any help?

[Trevor: · Accepted solution]

Vamitul

I don't know if that's the way do go about it but this is what you are looking for.

myParagraph=app.selection[0].paragraphs[0];
myText=myParagraph.characters.itemByRange(0,myParagraph.contents.toString().indexOf("\t"));
myText.remove();

To delete until the tab not including it use myText=myParagraph.characters.itemByRange(0,myParagraph.contents.toString().indexOf("\t")-1);

Trevor

Message was edited by: ~ Trevor ~

[Vamitul]

Thank you.

that's how i did it, but i think it's kind of a very ugly hack.

Also text.contents already returns a string, so no need for .toString();

[Trevor:]

Pleasure

The .toString() is a bit safer.

Try the script with the first line

myParagraph=app.selection[0].paragraphs.everyItem();

It works with the toString and doesn't without.

So it depends on how you define myParagraph

But as you wrote myParagraph and not myParagraphs you probably don't need the toString()

[Vamitul]

.everyItem() returns a array of paragraphs, so ofcourse it doesn't work. Anyway the paragraph part was a simplification. The actual code i needed was:

fNote.characters.itemByRange(0,fNote.contents.indexOf(separator)-1).contents=doc.footnoteOptions.prefix+String(j+1)+doc.footnoteOptions.suffix;

I had to make a script to change/restart the footnote numbering on a "per frame" basis.