How do you compare a paragraph's contents to a string?

[Thomas_Calvin]

Seems simple, right? And yet this doesn't work (you can see the debugger showing that the contents are "NOTE"), even when I use the more-permissive "==" comparison:

[brian_p_dts]

Your paragraph also likely will have a return character \r in it too. Debug by inspecting currPara.contents with an extra quote around it. Be curious as to why behavior you would expect doesn't turn out to be true.

[Thomas_Calvin]

Thanks for the reply. Yes, I suspected that it included the return character, and proved that was true by printing the character count (5). But then I tried comparing the first word to the string, and that also failed. So it's not clear what entity will match a string in quotes.

A Web search on the issue turns up nothing but wrong examples.

[Kasyan Servetsky]

It's not as simple as it seems! 🙂

InDesign text may contain and, in most cases, does contain special (hidden) characters like anchored objects, indexes, xrefs, etc.

To handle them effectively by script, I wrote a couple of functions and posted them here.

[Thomas_Calvin]

Thanks! Can't access that site, though. It times out.

Also, you'd think an API to a word-processing application would anticipate the need to compare strings. Especially if I ask for a word.

[brian_p_dts]

You can test a regular expression against the contents:

/note/gi.test(myPara.contents)

[Thomas_Calvin]

Thanks. That's probably the most reliable way.

How would one extract a substring by index (from a paragraph) and compare it to a string? I'm not sure at what point (if any) there's a plain JavaScript string to be had for a direct comparison.

[Peter Kahrel]

Try == instead of ===

[Kasyan Servetsky]

@Peter Kahrel He tried this and it didn't work: see the OP.

[Peter Kahrel]

Oops

[Thomas_Calvin]

Ha ha, NP; it's not totally obvious how many = there are with some fonts.