Variables not sticking?

Scripting Forums AppleScript | Mac OS X
#1

I feel like this is going to have the simplest answer and that I’m just not seeing what’s right in front of my face, but I have to ask about this.

For context, I have literally used the exact same if statement successfully in another script. Here’s what I’m trying to do:

  1. user selects a language from a list of about 40
  2. the script assigns the language a 2-letter all caps code

In the script I’ve designed language_code from the outset as “Null” just to make sure it actually changes. Similarly, the dialog box is also there only as a check, to make sure that language_code was properly set.



set language_code to "NULL"
set language_choices to {"Arabic (AR)", "Amharic (AM)", "Armenian (HY)", "Azerbaijani (AZ)", "Belarusian (BE)", "Bosnian (BS)", "Bulgarian (BG)", "Chinese (ZH)", "Croatian (HR)", "Czech (CS)", "Danish (DA)", "Dutch (NL)", "English (EN)", "Estonian (ET)", "Farsi (FA)", "Finnish (FI)", "French (FR)", "German (DE)", "Greek (EL)", "Hebrew (HE)", "Hindi (HI)", "Hungarian (HU)", "Indonesian (ID)", "Italian (IT)", "Japanese (JP)", "Kazakh (KK)", "Korean (KO)", "Latvian (LV)", "Lithuanian (LT)", "Malay (MS)", "Norwegian (NO)", "Polish (PL)", "Portuguese (PT)", "Romanian (RO)", "Russian (RU)", "Serbian (SR)", "Slovak (SK)", "Spanish (ES)", "Swahili (SW)", "Swedish (SV)", "Thai (TH)", "Turkish (TR)", "Ukrainian (UK)", "Urdu (UR)", "Vietnamese (VI)"}

set language_chosen to {choose from list language_choices}

if language_chosen is item 1 of language_choices then
	set language_code to "AR"
end if

display dialog language_code

All I ever get back is “null” (and before I had the “null” variable I just kept getting an error that said it language_code wasn’t defined but, like, wasn’t it just defined above by my if-statement?)

Thanks again guys. Like I said, I’m sure it’s just something really simple that I’m not seeing so late in the day…

#2

Hi nickp17.

‘choose from list’ returns a list of the chosen items, even when there’s only one ” unless the Cancel button’s clicked, in which case it returns ‘false’. Also, you had the command in a list, so you were getting a list within a list.



set language_code to "NULL"
set language_choices to {"Arabic (AR)", "Amharic (AM)", "Armenian (HY)", "Azerbaijani (AZ)", "Belarusian (BE)", "Bosnian (BS)", "Bulgarian (BG)", "Chinese (ZH)", "Croatian (HR)", "Czech (CS)", "Danish (DA)", "Dutch (NL)", "English (EN)", "Estonian (ET)", "Farsi (FA)", "Finnish (FI)", "French (FR)", "German (DE)", "Greek (EL)", "Hebrew (HE)", "Hindi (HI)", "Hungarian (HU)", "Indonesian (ID)", "Italian (IT)", "Japanese (JP)", "Kazakh (KK)", "Korean (KO)", "Latvian (LV)", "Lithuanian (LT)", "Malay (MS)", "Norwegian (NO)", "Polish (PL)", "Portuguese (PT)", "Romanian (RO)", "Russian (RU)", "Serbian (SR)", "Slovak (SK)", "Spanish (ES)", "Swahili (SW)", "Swedish (SV)", "Thai (TH)", "Turkish (TR)", "Ukrainian (UK)", "Urdu (UR)", "Vietnamese (VI)"}

set language_chosen to (choose from list language_choices)
if language_chosen is false then error number -128

if item 1 of language_chosen is item 1 of language_choices then
	set language_code to "AR"
end if

display dialog language_code
#3

Ah of course! Thank you Nigel! I only started learning applescript 2 weeks ago, so I’m still figuring out some of its subtleties. I appreciate the help.