Name

punctuation

Syntax

Ignoring punctuation but considering case
   (* do string comparison *)
end ignoring

Description

AppleScript considers punctuation marks such as commas and periods in strings by default when it compares strings for equality. If you enclose the string comparison in the statement ignoring punctuation...end ignoring, however, AppleScript will ignore the punctuation when evaluating a string comparison. punctuation comprises the following characters in AppleScript:

.

?

:

;

!

\

'

"

`

The next example uses the punctuation constant to ignore any commas in the numbers entered into a dialog box by a user. If the script did not use the ignoring punctuation statement, and the user entered a number with one or more commas (such as 1,000,000), then the statement:

if inputNum as real ≤ 1000

would raise an error. This is because by default the strings with nonnumber characters in them cannot be coerced to integers or reals (with the exception of strings like “1.0e + 4,” which would evaluate to the real type in scientific notation—1.0e + 4). In the case of the following script, the punctuation marks can be ignored, allowing “1,000,000” to be coerced to a real data type (which would look like 1.0e + 6). Chapter 3 discusses the real type.

set inputNum to text returned of (display dialog "Enter a number larger¬
than 1,000" default answer "")
ignoring punctuation
   if inputNum as real ≤ 1000 then
      display dialog "Remember it has to be bigger than 1,000"
   else
      display dialog "Your number is: " & inputNum
   end if
end ignoring