🚀 go-pugleaf

One thing that has come out of this is my realization that just because I can use the results of a search to address things directly, it still might be better to construct a way of solving a problem using multiple searches.

I just carved 10 minutes out of the run time of my script (processing 469 samples of data) by changing an interation over the results of a find into three find/replace calls.

Given that the real data has 46,000 entries, this will save a whole lot more than 10 minutes, come the day!

The same tricks one uses in the Find/Replace UI to get at special cases can pay off in scripts, too. In this case, I wanted to change the applied paragraph style of every paragraph that consisted of only a return (later in the script, I populate them).

I did it by:

app.findPreferences = null;
app.changePreferences = null;
myStory.search("^p^p",false,false,"^p�^p",{appliedParagraphStyle:myAstyle});

app.findPreferences = null;
app.changePreferences = null;
myStory.search("�",false,false,undefined,undefined,{appliedParagraphStyle:myCstyle});

app.findPreferences = null;
app.changePreferences = null;
myStory.search("�",false,false,"");

(myAstyle and myCstyle were previously set to references to the appropriate paragraph styles.) In the UI, this kind of thing is second nature, but in scripting, I tend not to think along these lines (at least at first).

Dave