Adding and saving whitespace/space characters to words

Scripting Forums AppleScript | Mac OS X
#1

Dear all,

Thanks for looking.

I need to add spaces or blanks to individual ‘source’ words.
Each word HAS to be a given length - 20 characters. The client system can only accept fixed length entries.

When a word is shorter or longer than required, the entry is rejected. I have been able to trim words that are too long.

So here is an example ;
“HEADROOM/SAN” is 12 characters long
what is needed is
"HEADROOM/SAN " which is 20 characters long.

Extensive Googling, reading the Apple manual and so on have not thrown up a guide, or at least I have been unable to find one.

Can anybody suggest where I might look?

Thanks for reading this.

Max

#2

This is a simple handler. It appends the character until the desired length is reached

on pad(theText, theCharacter, maxLength)
	repeat while length of theText < maxLength
		set theText to theText & theCharacter
	end repeat
	return theText
end pad

set testString to "HEADROOM/SAN"
set testString to pad(testString, space, 20)
#3

Stefan,

Perfect and really simple/compact.

I was unaware I could ‘declare/use’ space. I was trying to use %20 or " " and so on.
set testString to pad(testString, space, 20)

Thanks for your trouble.

Max

#4

Heres a version that doesn’t have a loop


on pad(theText)
	set c to length of theText
	if c ≥ 20 then return
	set c to 20 - c
	return theText & text 1 thru c of "                    " -- the string is made up of 20 spaces
end pad

set testString to "HEADROOM/SAN"
set testString to pad(testString)

It might be faster, but the spaces are hard-coded

**EDIT - removed the passed “maxLength” variable since I hard-coded it for length of 20

#5

Hello Robert,

Thanks for your script too. I have used Stefan’s script because the loop allows me to add a couple of other operations within the same loop.

As always happens, you and Stefan have both taught me something new.

Thanks for sending it over.

Max (Headroom San)

#6

Another very simple way is to concatenate the text string with a sequence of spaces, before or after, and then take the left or right desired number of characters. For example:



set targetLength to 20
set thePad to "                      " -- 19 spaces 
set testString to "HEADROOM/SAN"
set finalTestString to (testString & thePad)

set finalResult to text 1 thru targetLength of finalTestString

--return finalResult --> "HEADROOM/SAN        "
--return the number of characters of finalResult --> 20

–Padding a number with leading zeroes
–Example: leading zeroes to pad to three places


set theLeadingPad to "000"
set testNum to "7"
 
set finalNumber to text from -3 to -1 of (theLeadingPad & testNum)

--return finalNumber --> "007"