Just out of curiosity: are localised weekday names available somewhere in the system?
I was modifying a datestamping routine to include those, when that came up as a possible way of getting them.
What I did use was simple enough:
-- full day name
set localisedWeekDay to word 1 of ((current date) as text)
-- or abbreviated
set localisedWeekDay to (text items 1 thru 2 of ((current date) as text)) as text
-- memo to self: must respect TIDs here, or face tuttuttutting from peers
Another way would be a lookup table with day numbers and names (which that system file is, conceptually).
It is defined in the the nl_NL.utf-8 directory in /usr/share/locale. The file LC_TIME is the file with the weekday names in it. I’m assuming that your system locale is set to Dutch.
Oh dear… No, I wasn’t aiming for locale-agnostic code. Thanks for reminding me…
[Might have found out anyway - I’m signed up for a course in Portuguese, starting in a few weeks. I’m confident I’ll know how to say ‘next tuesday’ pretty soon ]
Mmyes. Not exactly a lookup table. Just a list of strings; I don’t think I would want to rely on their order.
I think your handler should be used like so:
timeLocalStrings((weekday of (current date) as text), "en_US", "nl_NL")
In a way, this uses the two LC_TIME files as one lookup table.
It should work with abbreviated names too, presumably. I don’t think you can get those with AppleScript, so for that you’d need a lookup table in the script.
Maybe hard-code the en_US file, and loose the 2nd parameter, to avoid mistakes.
Thank you, gentlemen.
You’re correct that you can’t depend on the order without a base. Every file has the same order so when you lookup the line in one file you can print the line in another file. LC_TIME files work this way because they are faster and saves space compared to localization strings, but the principle remains the same.
Yvan, no. It seems we are both using an osax DJ does not have. Change his ln variable, and she’ll work. Satimage?
DJ, just for fun I tried the script with an abbreviated day name. And learned something about sed - I think.
With an abbreviated name you get 2 line numbers, so it seems to apply a ‘contains’ condition, not “is equal to”.
I just looked at the sed manpage for the 1st time ever, which didn’t me much good.
Regulus and McUsr are both right. Some entries are multiple times in the same file. So we need to tell sed also to quit on first result. Also it should work with satimage users which, correctly mentioned, I don’t have installed.
timeLocalStrings("ma", "nl_NL", "en_US")
on timeLocalStrings(str, _from, _to)
set validLocales to every paragraph of (do shell script "ls /usr/share/locale | grep -i '.utf-8$' | awk -F. '{print $1}'")
if _from is not in validLocales or _to is not in validLocales then return str
set fPath to "/usr/share/locale/" & _from & ".UTF-8/LC_TIME"
set tPath to "/usr/share/locale/" & _to & ".UTF-8/LC_TIME"
set lineNumber to (do shell script "cat " & quoted form of fPath & " | sed -n '/^" & str & "$/ {=;q;}'") as integer
if lineNumber = 0 then return str
return do shell script "cat " & quoted form of tPath & " | sed -n -e '" & lineNumber & "," & lineNumber & "p'"
end timeLocalStrings
Not that it matters much, but awk is notoriously slow, and you are really shooting a sparrow with a cannon when return a field like that with awk. I first tried sed, and that was as hard it seemed, as to change newlines! Then I remembered cut!
I am really fond of awk too. And there is nothing wrong with your code, just an alternate, and possibley much faster way to get that field returned. I think it is generally a better way way to return just the first field of a list of a record separated by some delimiter, (period in this case), when no processing of data is needed!
No 100% vanilla, unless you want to write a plist parser in plain A/S.
It’s defaults or System Events otherwise.
And:
I can’t find that file on my 10.6.8 system. It’s a system file anyway (right?), to get the current user’s language/locale you’d read one of his plists:
do shell script "defaults read -g AppleLanguages"
-- or
do shell script "defaults read -g AppleLocale"
From my first run of the script I guessed that sed does a “contains” match, not “equal to”. In that case, quitting at the 1st match for “Tue” would return “Tuesday” when the order in the LC_TIME is reversed (short names after long names).
So, how does sed match? “equal to” or “contains”?
I can’t find that out from its manpage. It may be there, but hidden by the terminology.
AWK is written to outperform the shell big time and succeeded. Weird is that I would suspect that cut is indeed faster but seems not to be true on every machine. On my machine there is no difference, some machines cut is faster and others awk is faster. AWK is pretty awesome and insanely fast for an interpreter.
for instance when you lookup ‘Tue’ you would normally have an contain match. But when you wrap and ^…$ around it (begins with and ends with) it is an exact match.
--weekday of (current date) as text
"Wed"
timeLocalStrings(result, "en_US", "fr_FR")
on timeLocalStrings(str, _from, _to)
set vName to path to startup disk as text
set fPath to vName & "usr:share:locale:" & _from & ".UTF-8:LC_TIME"
set tPath to vName & ":usr:share:locale:" & _to & ".UTF-8:LC_TIME"
tell application "System Events"
{exists disk item fPath, exists disk item tPath}
end tell
if result contains false then return str
paragraphs of (read file fPath)
tell application "ASObjC Runner"
set maybe to look in list result matching str
end tell
if maybe = {} then return str
item 1 of maybe
paragraph result of (read file tPath)
return result
end timeLocalStrings
]
Then I remembered cut!