Name

considering [but ignoring] end [considering]

Syntax

Considering case
   "animal" is equal to "AniMal" -- returns false
end considering

Description

Use considering statements to specify the elements that should be considered during string comparisons and communications with other applications. The statements that constitute the comparison are enclosed in the considering...end considering block. This statement block affects how each of its enclosed statements is processed. The considering statement can also alter AppleScript’s default behavior for the code that is executed prior to the end of the considering statement (signaled by an end or end considering phrase). For example, if you wanted to compare two strings and take upper- or lowercase characters into account, but ignore any white space in the strings, then you would use the statement: considering case but ignoring white space...end considering. AppleScript’s default behavior is to consider elements such as case, white space, and punctuation when it compares strings for equality. The following constants can also be used in the considering statement (Chapter 6 , discusses AppleScript’s constants):

• application responses

• case

• diacriticals

• expansion

• hyphens

• punctuation (i.e., . , ? : ; ! \ ' " `)

• white space

AppleScript considers by default an application’s responses to any Apple events that your script sends them. You can use the ignoring statement to ignore responses from an application, as in considering case but ignoring application responses.

There are a few instances when ignoring application responses might make sense, such as when you are sending quit commands to several running processes. If one of the processes responds to the command with an error, then the script ignores its response (as well as any other application response) and thus prevents it from disrupting the execution of the rest of the script. See “ignoring” in this chapter for more details.

Examples

This code shows how to use this statement with a fairly complex string comparison:

tell application "Finder"
   considering case but ignoring punctuation, white space and hyphens
      set theTruth to ("voracious appetite" is equal to "voracious,¬
      appetite") --returns true
   end considering
end tell

The example tells AppleScript which elements to consider and ignore when executing the string comparison within the considering statement block. Since white space, hyphens, and punctuation should be ignored in the comparison, the two strings turn out the same. Therefore, the theTruth variable is set to true. If you are wondering why you would ever ignore these elements in a string comparison, programs often deal with a lot of junk characters and tokens, such as markup-language elements, which are returned from applications or web pages. The considering statement allows you, in a minimal way, to filter out elements that you do not want to include in string comparisons (unfortunately, you will have to write custom functions or use an HTML-parsing osax to filter out the common < > characters in hypertext markup language [HTML], as AppleScript does not consider them to be “punctuation”).